Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In today’s dynamic threat landscape, technical debt isn’t just a budgeting headache—it’s a growing national security risk. According to McKinsey, technical debt consumes up to 20% of engineering and DevOps capacity across large enterprises. For U.S. federal agencies—defense and civilian alike—the cost of carrying outdated, unsupported infrastructure goes far beyond inefficiency.

Security operations teams face a daily balancing act: rapidly reduce risk while keeping business-critical traffic flowing across sprawling hybrid networks. Yet traditional monitoring and vulnerability-scanning tools only show snapshots of device status. They rarely explain how an attacker could move laterally, why a firewall rule is ineffective, or whether a cloud control actually matches on-prem policy.

In 2025, risk management has climbed near the top of the CIO agenda—second only to AI adoption, according to the 2025 State of the CIO report. As global enterprises become more dependent on digital infrastructure, the consequences of network outages, misconfigurations, or security breaches have grown exponentially. CIOs, CISOs, and their teams now face the dual challenge of managing risk while enabling innovation.

In the race to modernize IT operations, automation is no longer optional—it’s essential. For network teams tasked with managing complex, hybrid environments, a Network Digital Twin (NDT) provides the trusted foundation required to automate intelligently and confidently. By offering an always-accurate, mathematically-precise virtual copy of your network, an NDT accelerates automation across key operational domains—enabling safer changes, faster audits, and more resilient infrastructure.

Forward Networks is proud to announce that we have been recognized again for our industry-leading security capabilities—winning the Global InfoSec Award for the third consecutive year and the Security Today Govies Award for the second year in a row. This year, Cyber Defense Magazine honored Forward Networks with the Trailblazer Compliance Award in its 13th Annual Global InfoSec Awards.