Digital Twins: Benefit from All the Agility of the Public Cloud for Your IT Maintenance

Technical differences, however small, between production and non-production environments can complexify the maintenance of critical system applications (including SAP) and take you by surprise. To prevent these risks, cloning the environments temporarily is the safest way to guarantee realistic tests and ensure maintenance without risk of unforeseen problems.

To meet the needs of our clients, we’ve developed scripts that facilitate the quick deployment of a digital twin in the cloud.

What’s a Digital Twin?

A digital twin, or clone, is an identical copy of an existing environment that stays completely isolated and independent from the other systems. The environment is instantly duplicated in another isolated environment. This digital twin allows us to perform various operations whether technical or functional.

Traditional test environments can sometimes contain obsolete data or data that’s not up to date. Creating a clone makes it possible to obtain an exact copy of the production environment, both from the data and the technical point of view.

The digital twin is put at the disposal of the technical teams only as long as is required to perform the activities that required the creation of the clone, from a few hours to a few days, at most.

Creating a clone offers the undeniable advantage of offering more realistic tests of the maintenance plan and reducing its impact on your activities, namely by providing you with a deployment plan with precise timing.

Digital twins represent a pioneering innovation in the computing landscape. By creating a virtual replica of a physical system or process, digital twins offer various advantages that push the boundaries of IT innovation.

• Fast testing of new products or activation of new features;
• Simulation of different parameters to identify bottlenecks and optimize system performance (with our Xperion service, for example);
• Performance of more predictive maintenance by identifying potential failures;
• Implementation of a secure and temporary environment for the education and training of our technical consultants on the client’s specific procedures…

Automated Scripts for More Efficiency

In addition to the inherent advantages that come with cloning, the DevOps team at oXya and our experts specialized in Google Cloud have developed tools and automated scripts for more efficiency.

As a result, operations such as creating and deleting digital twins can be done in a few clicks. This means a process that’s fast, reliable and standardized, all at the same time!

Simply by selecting the environment and the desired options (e.g., include or not the HA database, the number of application servers) from oXya’s DevOps platform, you can quickly deploy your digital twin on the cloud for a specified period of time.

Maximum Agility Thanks to the Cloud

Public cloud solutions offer unparalleled agility: they allow us to quickly create clones on a pay-as-you-go basis. Since acquisition processes are eliminated, it’s possible to create a clone at the desired moment and without delay. You only pay for the few hours during which you use the clone.

In partnership with Google Cloud, oXya initially developed a specific set of tools for that public cloud. However, our team has industrialized its model and we’re in a position to create digital twins with the same agility on all the other types of platforms.

Safe Tests for HA Clusters

High Availability Clusters (HA) are a particularly interesting technology to ensure the maximum availability of critical applications. However, they’re a more complex and precise technology that carries additional risks and presents some challenges in terms of maintenance.

Being able to clone the clusters on an isolated environment allows us to simulate technical operations (updates, modifications of the parameters, and others) while validating the impacts.

When the operation works properly, we’re able to reproduce it live on the client’s real cluster environment and aim for near-zero downtime.

In addition to technical maintenance, digital twins can also be used for performance tests. Indeed, because they have both the same data and the same number of resources (CPU, memory, and others), they allow the client to test various improvements. The client can then compare the response and execution times of the current process with those of the improved process.

Optimal Cost Management

The temporary nature of digital twins significantly reduces costs, whether in terms of the labour or equipment required.

Moreover, the platform developed by our DevOps team calculates the exact activation costs for the clone before it’s created, which allows us to adjust the options selected or the lifespan of the digital twin.

Consequently, we’re able to present to the client, with transparency and no surprises, a detailed proposal on the platform costs of the digital twin.

The digital twins allow you to test your critical applications more realistically while reducing risks. With the help of our DevOps team, we help you maximize your return on investment with our solution on the public cloud. Simplify the maintenance of your system and optimize the management of your financial resources with oXya.