Why Isn’t ISP Management Automated?

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.

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