When a construction crew cut a backup circuit with the primary already offline, flights stalled across five airports for eight hours. Enterprise networks have gotten smarter, but ISP management is still stuck in the past.

In this episode of Built for Trust, Nick Lippis sits down with Tatiana Finkelsteyn, Founder and CEO of zLinq, to explore the hidden complexity of enterprise connectivity and the challenges of moving toward autonomous infrastructure.

They discuss how the shift from MPLS to SD-WAN changed ISP management, why enterprises still rely on spreadsheets to manage dozens of providers, and why roughly a third of telecom outages trace back to unpaid bills, not broken hardware. Tatiana walks through a four-stage maturity curve, from spreadsheets to orchestration to automation. They also get into where human intervention remains essential and how satellite connectivity is changing the landscape.

Tune in to hear what it will take to modernize ISP management and move closer to autonomous networking.

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Enterprise networks carry decades of legacy gear, dozens of OS variants, and change processes that can take a hundred signatures to approve. AI promises to take network operations further, but how much control are enterprises ready to hand over?

In this episode of Built for Trust, Nick Lippis talks with Alex Henthorn-Iwane of Gluware about the evolution of network automation and the road to autonomous infrastructure.

They explore why AI adoption is moving faster in observability than in network change management and why brownfield environments make automation so much harder. Nick and Alex also debate whether AI can check its own work, and land on why independent validation rooted in the live network matters as AI takes on a bigger operational role.

Alex shares how AI can help teams cut through the flood of vulnerabilities, prioritize what truly requires action, and build the automation foundation that makes autonomy possible. Plus why there's no FSD for a 2002 Corolla, and what enterprise networks need to change before AI can truly take the wheel.

New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified.

This episode is part of a seven-part sponsored series with Cisco focused on the technologies defining the next era of enterprise networking, with new episodes released each month.

Open networking promised choice. Running it was another story.

Tom Gillis, Chief Technology Officer at Cisco, and Murali Gandluru, who leads Cisco’s data center networking business, join Nick Lippis to tackle a question debated across the ONUG community. Where does SONiC fit in the enterprise, and how can teams run different network operating systems side by side without adding operational overhead?

Tom explains why Cisco remains committed to SONiC alongside NX-OS and ACI. Murali describes how Cisco’s Nexus One architecture brings them under a common management framework on shared hardware. The two discuss why network teams need to move beyond configuring individual switches through the CLI and toward more automated operations.

They also examine what hybrid AI means when a single workload uses both cloud-based and on-premises models for reasons of cost, security, and sovereignty. In a demonstration, Murali shows how Cisco extends visibility and policy to Kubernetes workloads and helps network and platform teams investigate a performance issue together, with a person approving the fix.

The conversation closes with practical advice for infrastructure leaders on adopting a cloud operating model and keeping software current.

New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified.