Digital twins provide organisations with complete virtual prototypes of real-world systems, enabling them to simulate and manage an entire lifecycle of products and assets.
Digital twin applications help increase efficiencies exponentially over time, for example, by scheduling maintenance around predictive methodologies that become more accurate with real-world testing and response.
At the recent Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, there were several examples of digital twins in action: in smart cities, to monitor climate change, or to optimise infrastructure with less construction waste throughout the lifecycle of a building, from construction to end of life. They can also be used to help telecom operators create a predictive model of their customers. It is not going too far to argue that digital twins have become one of the tech sector’s greatest—but largely unheralded—success stories.
To date, there have been relatively few discussions of how digital twins can play a major role in cybersecurity. However, the World Economic Forum argues that while digital twin technology is still perceived primarily as a 3D replica of physical assets, that overlooks its potential for a range of cybersecurity applications. Indeed, it argues that digital twin technology can enhance cybersecurity.
Using digital twins for physical security
Designing an effective security system for a physical environment necessitates consideration of many variables. Implementing inadequate or poor placement of security equipment such as CCTV can create vulnerabilities—and overloading the system with cameras and high-tech gadgets can lead to significant and often unnecessary expenses.
In this context, the Forum argues, a digital twin of the physical environment provides a range of benefits, from real-time monitoring to optimised resource allocation. It enables predictive analysis and scenario planning, helping organisations to anticipate threats and develop effective and proactive defense strategies. A digital twin solution, the Forum continues, can drive 10%-50% cost savings in physical security projects by optimising security setups and configurations.
Network digital twins
In this scenario, the Forum suggests that as networks grow increasingly complex, organisations face significant challenges in maintaining comprehensive network visibility, ensuring compliance and verification, and identifying potential vulnerabilities.
This can create security gaps, increase operational risks, and slow down the response time to various requests. Adopting a network digital twin cuts through these challenges by providing a comprehensive, real-time replica of the network, enabling seamless validation and verification of configurations and security policies across individual network components. Using network digital twins could cut request delivery times by up to 20%, the Forum suggests.
Security operations centre twins
A security operations centre (SOC) is a centralised function within an organisation that monitors, detects, investigates, and responds to cyber threats. It helps to ensure the protection of assets such as intellectual property, data, and business systems.
By creating a virtual replica of an organisation’s IT or operational technology (OT) infrastructure, security teams can simulate potential cyber threats in a controlled environment. For example, a digital twin can model the impact of a ransomware attack on an accurate replica of the system, helping organisations develop, test, and optimise their incident response plans.
IBM argues that AI has reduced breach detection times by 33% and containment times by 43% in SOCs, demonstrating the impact of automation in incident response. According to the Forum, digital twin technology builds on this by creating real-time virtual replicas, enabling SOCs to simulate attacks and optimise defenses. This enhanced visibility can drive even greater improvements, potentially surpassing AI-only results.
The Forum’s discussion highlights the benefits of integrating twins into cyber strategies, arguing that the digital twin market has enjoyed explosive growth and demonstrated its value across cybersecurity applications, from physical security optimisation to network management and SOC operations.
It argues that organisations can conduct impact analyses to assess how this technology may benefit their value chain and identify the challenges it might introduce.
What is lacking here is more detail. The Forum is right to highlight the benefits of seeing digital twins beyond being a 3D replica of physical assets. But for organisations to truly comprehend the benefits of using digital twins to enhance their cybersecurity positioning and increase their resilience to cyberattacks, there needs to be more case studies, detailed applications, discussion of the challenges, and costings.
