Gartner highlights ‘digital twins’ as an emerging organizational resilience tool
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- Published: Friday, 14 December 2018 09:15
In its latest ‘Hype Cycle for IT in GCC’ Gartner identifies various technologies that will reach mainstream adoption in five to 10 years. Of these one in particular - ‘digital twins’ - has strong potential for assisting organizations improve their organizational resilience.
Gartner says that a digital twin is a virtual representation of a real object that is designed to optimize the operation of assets. The primary short-term use is to lower maintenance costs and increase asset uptime.
Digital twins use artificial intelligence and machine learning alongside other techniques to create digital avatars that change and develop alongside the physical aspect being modelled. They can be used to harden existing systems and design new, more resilient, ones; they can also be used to identify hidden vulnerabilities.
“Digital twins enable businesses to optimize or transform their business model and will become the dominant design pattern for solutions in the next decade,” said Santhosh Rao, senior research director at Gartner. “The challenge for organizations will be to change their thinking from a hardware-centric to a hardware-plus-software-centric perspective in order to fully integrate digital twins internally.”
Gartner says that organizations considering the use of digital twins should focus on identifying a portfolio of digital twin initiatives that provide short (within one year) and midrange (within five years) paybacks. Simultaneously, they need to conduct a threat and opportunity analysis of their current business ecosystem, incorporating digital twin developments by competitors or partners.
