The best things in life come in pairs: bookends, fuzzy socks, earbuds, and…digital twins?
Organizations across the nation are twinning, and not in the “Who wore it better?” type of way. Instead, they’re doing it digitally: virtual representations of physical objects, people, or processes that allow businesses to replicate or test different variables.
Intuitus Corp. founder, president, and CEO David Shaw told IT Brew that the concept of digital twins has been around since the 1960s, when NASA engineers made physical replicas of space crafts in a bid to replicate and solve problems. He said digital twins have since evolved from just mirroring their physical correspondent to being a “framework for linking physical and digital worlds” that can make predictions that could inform business decisions.
Shaw is also a co-chair of the aerospace and defense working group at the Digital Twin Consortium (DTC), a group dedicated to advancing digital twin education and technology. “You’re pulling together a lot of information that’s coalesced into one unit and that unit then has...all the data that you really need to simulate a real-world activity,” he said. “That real-world activity then keeps pace with that.”
Digital twin, you say? Greg Porter, principal solutions architect at Sev1Tech, said digital twin adoption is still in its early phases, but the argument for using them in the workplace is compelling.
“What makes digital twins better than just [the physical system] is the ability to actually simulate and go into the future and simulate different scenarios and stuff without actually disrupting the real thing on the other side of a digital twin,” Porter, a DTC steering committee member, said.
According to Porter, there are various use cases for digital twins. The healthcare industry, for example, can use digital twins to simulate different procedures and how new medications may affect the body, he said. He added other organizations may create digital twins of their employees to understand the physical assets they come into contact with (such as computer equipment) and if they are potentially widening their company’s cyberattack surface.
“It’s really being able to understand how the employee fits within your organization,” Porter said, adding that the cost to deploy digital twins can vary anywhere between a couple hundred and millions of dollars, depending on their use case.
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Double trouble. While digital twins can be beneficial for prototyping and testing, Porter said they could also heighten cybersecurity risks because of the data they leverage.
“When you’re getting that full-loop digital twin, where you’re feeding the virtual data and then from the virtual back to the real world, you’re opening a bigger attack vector because now you’re actually giving a direct path into physical things that could easily be taken over,” Porter said. If the digital twin infrastructure isn’t set up correctly, malicious actors could gain access to and manipulate data from the physical system the digital twin is replicating.
Kayne McGladrey, CISO in residence at Hyperproof, added that intellectual property theft is another risk for organizations, as a malicious actor may seek to access a digital twin to find a way to gain a competitive advantage over another company.
“If you’re dealing with a nation-state crew, advanced persistent threat, whatever we want to call them today, the risk there is non-obvious, but it ultimately leads to a competition problem,” McGladrey said.
How to twin safely. Shaw said organizations need strict controls around the data being leveraged in the digital twin to avoid infecting the entire digital twin environment and broader IT infrastructure.
“If you have rogue activity going on the outside, you need to go on, fence that off, and say, ‘Thank you very much, but…you’re not going to be a part of what we’re doing here at this point,’” he said.
Fortunately, McGladrey said “classic cybersecurity” with a “couple wrinkles” is all it takes to secure digital twins in the workplace. He recommended placing multi-factor authentication, preferably phishing-resistant, on digital twin environments, as well as limiting access controls to users appropriately.
“You also want to have fairly robust logging of what happened, when and why and who,” he added.