Pavel Bykov is the co-founder and CEO of IP Fabric, which has been pioneering network assurance since 2016. With experience leading digital transformation initiatives and building and managing global networks for Fortune 500 companies, Pavel has seen firsthand the inefficiencies that network engineers face due to a lack of robust tools. Under Pavel’s leadership, IP Fabric modernizes network operations at enterprise scale for the likes of Red Hat, Major League Baseball and Air France. He’s on a mission to improve reliability, security and business transformation at scale.

In this Q&A, Pavel discusses how enterprises can achieve better control over their networks, navigate the growing demands of compliance and create a strong foundation for network-wide automation.

What problem is IP Fabric solving?

Lack of end-to-end control of the network. IP Fabric delivers end-to-end visibility across complex, distributed environments. Enterprise technology spans on-premises infrastructure, multiple clouds, third-party services and everything in between. But most organizations still rely on a patchwork of point solutions that don’t give them a complete, unified view of network behavior. That leads to blind spots from unmanaged devices, as well as unknown dependencies and misconfigurations, which can pose security risks.

We built IP Fabric to automate discovery and documentation across the entire network, no matter how complex. Our platform provides dynamic, time-stamped snapshots that organizations can use to validate security policies, gauge network health and prove continuous compliance. It gives organizations true operational control.

How has the role of network visibility and automation evolved since you founded IP Fabric?

When we started in 2016, we often heard, “We’ll automate once everything else is under control.” But in reality, without visibility and automation, you never gain control. The complexity only grows.

Today, the conversation has shifted. Visibility and automation are foundational. You can’t secure what you can’t see, and you can’t automate if you don’t trust your data. We’ve also seen a growing recognition that visibility isn’t just for network teams — it supports security, compliance and digital transformation goals across the business.

CIOs face a tough tradeoff between compliance and operational excellence. How do you advise leaders to balance these competing pressures?

It’s a real challenge, because compliance is non-negotiable — you have to meet regulatory requirements. But if compliance becomes a siloed, manual process, it can drain resources and slow down the business.

The key is to embed compliance into daily operations through automation. Rather than treating audits as a single event, make compliance a continuous, automated outcome of how you run your network. Platforms like ours automate evidence collection, validate configurations against policies and generate audit-ready reports. That way, compliance supports operational excellence instead of competing with it.

We hear a lot about “control” in networks. Why do you believe achieving this control is so difficult — and so critical?

Control is difficult because modern networks are so fragmented. You have different teams managing different technologies, different clouds, different regions. No one person or tool sees the entire picture. And when you lose visibility, you lose control. You can’t enforce policies, you can’t detect anomalies and you can’t confidently make changes.

Control is critical because the business depends on its network. If something breaks, or if there’s a security incident, the business suffers. And it’s not enough to hold the cloud provider or the vendor responsible. Ultimately, the accountability for that network sits with the organization. Achieving control means building a complete, accurate, always-updated understanding of the network as it actually exists. IP Fabric builds the network representation from its actual state, not just as it’s documented on paper.

With networks spanning cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments, what are some of the biggest visibility gaps that put organizations at risk?

One of the biggest gaps is unmanaged or unknown devices. In almost every proof of concept we run, we discover devices or connections the customer didn’t know existed. Those unmanaged assets can bypass security policies, introduce vulnerabilities or become failure points.

Another gap is lack of path mapping, resulting in unexpected paths and firewall bypass scenarios, especially with transparent firewall deployments. Many tools focus on policy deployment, but they fail to consider the paths the traffic actually takes. Without visibility into those paths, it’s hard to detect potential for breaches or misconfigurations that could expose critical systems.

Compliance frameworks like NIST, ISO 27001, DORA and NIS2 are raising the bar. How can enterprises prepare for audits without draining their resources?

The most effective approach is having a digital twin of the network. Manual audits are expensive, time-consuming and disruptive. But if you automate compliance validation by leveraging digital twin technology as part of your operational processes, you’re always audit-ready.

For example, IP Fabric continuously collects, models and validates network data against compliance policies. Instead of spending weeks or months gathering and modeling network behavior for documentation for an audit, you can generate the necessary reports in minutes. Automation turns compliance from a reactive scramble into a proactive, predictable process.

How can IT leaders future-proof their environments?

As networks grow more complex, the real challenge isn’t just deploying new technology; it’s managing it in the context of what’s already in place. Every new service adds value but also increases the surface area to control. My advice is to start with the undeniable fact that network state is the only authoritative source of truth. With time, the design and documentation systems change, but the network itself is what is actually providing the communication fabric. This will never change, and adopting this mindset will work into the future. Then building a complete, accurate view of your network that will be used as the foundation to drive automation, analytics and collaboration. Operations, security and compliance goals are converging — your teams and tools must too.

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