Forward launches Predict to verify network changes before they reach production
Network verification company Forward Inc. today launched Forward Predict, a new capability that lets network teams test proposed changes against a digital twin of their production network before deploying them.
The company says Predict runs every proposed change against a mathematically accurate model of the entire production environment, flagging outages, security exposures and policy conflicts before they reach live infrastructure. Forward is pitching the product as the foundation for what it calls autonomous networking, in which artificial intelligence agents propose, validate and execute changes without human intervention.
The release coincides with a corporate rebrand from Forward Networks to simply Forward. The product will be available in fall.
The release is seeking to address the issue whereby, for years, network engineering has lacked an equivalent of the staging environments that software developers rely on. Change windows are planned weeks in advance, run through method-of-procedure documents and Change Advisory Boards and still routinely produce outages because the production network has been the only true test environment.
