Imagine having the ability to virtually clone any kind of physical object and test its abilities in different scenarios.
It would make your product development process so much faster and easier, right?
Well, that’s exactly what Digital Twin technology offers. It gives you the ability to create a real-time equivalent of a physical object or process to get more clarity on different components and conduct tests to validate your ideas.
In this article, we will dive deep into this topic and tell you everything you need to know about the most significant use cases of digital twins, as well as the benefits that they offer to companies and organizations worldwide.
What Is a Digital Twin?
A digital twin is a technology that organizations use to virtually clone their network systems and create replicas with the intention of training their teams, testing new product features, and running hyper-realistic simulations in a secure environment.
Imagine an environment where you can create a digital copy of your physical product using its data and simulation models to replicate its real-world characteristics and behavior.
So, in case your organization needs to analyze, monitor, and optimize the performance of various physical objects and counterparts in real time, using the digital twin technology might be the most appropriate solution for you.
It is also worth mentioning that there are two main types of digital twins:
- Digital Twin to Create Exact Replicas – used for testing complex objects (Satellite Systems, for example) to have an in-depth overview of each part within the system.
- Digital Twin to Create Meaningful Replicas – used for testing many of the same objects simultaneously (hundreds of desktops for your company’s system, for example), giving you the possibility to conduct collective tests in an effective manner.
According to the research, the global digital twin market is expected to grow to $259.32 billion by 2032, exhibiting a CAGR of 39.8% during the forecast period.
What Are the Most Prominent Use Cases of Digital Twins?
There are lots of benefits that digital twins provide to organizations worldwide. This technology has continuously proved to deliver immense value to organizations trying to streamline their production and take care of their cyber preparedness management.
Let’s take a look at the most common use cases of digital twins that have proven to deliver great results for companies:
Ensuring Technological Safety and Data Security
In today’s world, where new technologies and solutions are being launched almost every single day, it is important to take every measure possible to ensure their safety and security are at the highest level.
Digital twin technology makes it more convenient to validate various solutions by providing a safe environment for testing these pieces of technology across different scenarios.
Let’s take the emergence of Smart City solutions as an example. As cities become more interconnected and reliant on digital systems than ever, it is essential to test different solutions before deployment to avoid possible interruptions and disruptions within these systems.
The same goes for data security – smart cities highly rely on IoT (Internet of Things) systems, making it more attractive for hackers to target them and steal important information from various networks.
However, digital twins allow the simulation of systems before implementation, which helps providers expose their technology to problems and solve them before deploying their solutions for the users.
Creating Safe Environments That Teams Can Use to Train
Other than testing new technologies, digital twins can help you create an incredible environment for training your team members and enhancing their skills.
Generally, conducting hands-on training sessions for your employees can get quite costly at times. Learning about new aspects of any industry comes with lots of mistakes, which can be expensive and dangerous.
Alternatively, digital twins provide a virtual environment where you can replicate real-world assets. This allows your employees to test their skills and experiment with different systems in a controlled setting, eliminating any possibility of causing actual damage to these systems.
This approach brings improved engagement among employees and gives you the possibility to craft more personalized learning modules catered to the unique requirements of each team member.
That said, companies and organizations from many different sectors can benefit from this use case – health care, space, manufacturing, construction, engineering, just to name a few.
Streamlining Your Operations and Product Development Efforts
Another significant use case that digital twins provide to companies is all about streamlining operations and improving product quality.
Digital twins give you the opportunity to simulate different operational scenarios, which can potentially help you analyze the effectiveness of the existing parameters. This way, it’s easier to increase productivity and boost efficiency for everyone involved.
Other than that, this technology helps enhance product quality as well. Think of it as a virtual sandbox where your team can have a detailed overview of different parts of the product, making it easier to fix problems that might occur.
The whole idea of using digital twins for your product development efforts is that it gives you an opportunity to easily spot any kind of technical inconsistencies and misalignments and instantly fix them.
Testing New Technologies Without Interrupting Your Ongoing Processes
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to testing new technologies is that this process causes interruptions in the ongoing operations, making the testing activity inconvenient for everyone involved.
At the same time, there are lots of new solutions that organizations need to test to enhance their products and increase the overall efficiency of their processes.
This is another use case where digital twins have proved to be incredibly useful – with the ability it offers to make the exact digital replica of your product assets, you have the ability to test the new solutions and check their validity and compatibility in a simulated environment.
Taking this approach is beneficial because this way, you avoid any interruptions in your ongoing production, and it gives you more clarity on which new products or solutions are compatible with your requirements.
Real-Life Examples of Digital Twin Usage From CybExer Technologies
To get a better understanding of how use cases of digital twins play out in real-world scenarios, let’s take a look at some projects where our team at CybExer Technologies successfully implemented a digital twin technology.
Using Digital Twins for Space Based Assets
The Academic Satellite project from the University of Tartu aims to understand the behavior of space satellites with respect to cyber security. The project is funded by the European Union and Enterprise Estonia.
The main challenge in this project was to track the satellite’s progress at such a massive scale and ensure that it delivered appropriate data to the researchers.
This is where the use of digital twin technology was necessary – with the help of CybExer Technologies, the research team was able to create the exact replica of the satellite and test different scenarios before their launch.
Creating replicas of satellite system networks, identifying the areas of improvement, and running simulations to generate valuable insights about their systems helped the team make the launch more successful and fruitful.
Generally, cyber security in space is a new topic and it requires a lot of attention, and that’s why the role of digital twins is vital in this process.
Digital Twins Enhancing the Resilience of Smart City Solutions
Together with Auve Tech, the City of Tartu, and the University of Tartu, CybExer Technologies unveiled Smart City Cyber Range technology, which aims to enhance the cyber resilience of the entire ecosystem.
Besides providing cybersecurity training and exercises, this technology brings the digital twin element to the city & municipality organizations and third parties operating smart city systems.
Generally, there are lots of benefits that the smart city concept brings to society, including smart waste management, smooth traffic, clean air, and more. In fact, there are 170 projects aimed at developing smart cities in the European Union.
Of course, this kind of rapid development and exponential growth requires a lot of testing and validation from the provider’s side.
Digital Twins is massively beneficial in this case as well – its ability to replicate different components and show how they work together is exactly what’s needed for ensuring a high level of safety and security for the rapid development of smart city solutions.
CybExer Technologies – Leading the Way to Cyber Preparedness
Utilizing the most relevant use cases of digital twins is a great way to ensure the trustworthiness and reliability of your solutions, not to mention the improvements your organization makes in terms of enhancing cyber preparedness management and saving costs.
CybExer Technologies has been a driving force in the cybersecurity field since 2016. Committed to enhancing global cybersecurity capabilities, our team offers advanced solutions that help organizations boost their cyber resilience.
If you’d like to learn more about our offering and products, feel free to schedule a call with our cyber range and digital twin experts to discuss your organization’s specific needs.
