By Pavel Bykov, CEO of IP Fabric. IP Fabric won the ‘Best in Security Systems‘, and was named a finalist for ‘Best Firewall Security Solution‘ categories at The 2025 Cloud Security Awards.

With aging legacy systems, shifting compliance regulations, and a constant pressure to scale, IT leaders face a critical imperative: maintaining control over their networks.

The success of any business is tightly interwoven with the reliability and security of its network. Without control, organizations risk costly downtime, regulatory violations, and weakened security postures.

Control cannot exist without visibility, yet visibility is exactly where most enterprises fall short. According to Network World, 90% of CIOs lack a unified network architecture model, instead relying on observability tools and CMDBs that fail to deliver the level of insight needed to govern complex, distributed networks.

The Problem with Observability Tools

In 2022, IDC reported that 60% of IT and software engineers found monitoring tools inadequate for a unified view of their network. Observability tools promise insights into network and application performance, but are hampered by significant limitations, including:

• Fragmented Views: These tools typically focus on specific network layers or environments. For example, one tool might monitor AWS instances in the cloud, while another oversees VPNs or routers in an on-prem data center. Without a single source of truth, IT teams are slower to diagnose and troubleshoot issues, leaving networks vulnerable in the interim.
• Limited Context: Observability tools often detect anomalies but lack root-cause analysis. An IT team might get an alert about dropped packets, but without knowing whether it’s a misconfigured firewall, routing issue, or overloaded server, troubleshooting turns into guesswork.
• Prioritizing Performance Over Security: Most observability tools center on performance metrics while overlooking critical security risks like open ports, misconfigured access controls, or unmonitored third-party connections.

Why CMDBs Aren’t Enough

Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) were once seen as the backbone of network management. While helpful in certain cases, they struggle to provide accurate, in-depth insights, primarily due to the unidirectional nature of the probes. CMDBs can miss 10-20% of devices on the network, as well as virtualized assets, cloud-based workloads, or ephemeral containers.

CMDBs also require manual updates. With enterprises making tens of thousands of configuration changes per year, this sort of manual upkeep is virtually impossible. By the time an IT team updates a record, their network has likely already changed, rendering the CMDB a lagging – rather than leading – source of truth.

A New Era Demands a New Solution

Observability tools are limited. CMDBs cannot guarantee accuracy. However, network assurance provides a different approach. It offers what legacy tools cannot: complete visibility and control across hybrid multicloud environments. These platforms map out an organization’s entire infrastructure across cloud, network, and security systems so that they can proactively spot dependencies, security gaps, and risks to compliance.

Sometimes a single configuration change is all it takes to cause a cascade of disruptions across the network. Changes are inevitable in any network, and your infrastructure must be resilient in the face of those changes. Whether it’s a misconfigured firewall, an open port, or an unmonitored connection, network assurance platforms can automatically detect configuration changes, map their impact, and flag risks before they disrupt critical services.

On top of preventing issues, these platforms lay the groundwork for effective network automation. Without accurate data, automation can amplify errors, leading to “garbage in, garbage out” scenarios that increase outages rather than prevent them. Network assurance ensures automation works as intended, scaling policies across the organization.

When disruptions do occur, automated network assurance accelerates troubleshooting with root-cause analysis, helping teams quickly detect, respond to, and resolve issues. This reduces human error and minimizes downtime, keeping operations running smoothly.

It boils down to this: Unlike passive observability tools and static CMDBs, network assurance actively ensures networks remain secure, compliant, and fully operational. By providing a solid foundation for both visibility and automation, these platforms are the key to helping businesses deliver their services with confidence, no matter how complex their infrastructure becomes.

The Future is Automated Network Assurance

To keep up with the demands of modern networks, businesses need unified, forward-thinking solutions—not outdated tools or fragmented systems. Organizations must focus on:

• Expanding visibility into cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.
• Proactively detecting and preventing vulnerabilities to stave off risk and noncompliance.
• Automating troubleshooting and remediation to reduce MTTR and human error.

Network assurance is the missing puzzle piece that enables these outcomes. For enterprises ready to rethink their approach, the future of networking is clear; it’s time to leave behind the limitations of yesterday’s tools and adopt a comprehensive, intelligent framework for modern network management.