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Your network can be “up” and still be the thing that slows every cloud migration, security rollout, and AI initiative. From the Lumen booth at the Gartner IT Symposium, we sit down with Scott Yao to get specific about what’s really driving enterprise network complexity: different networking models to the cloud, inside each cloud, and between clouds, plus the operational burden that grows every time you add another workload or provider.
Scott walks us through Lumen’s push to modernize the old telco experience and flip the model from ticket-based provisioning to on-demand, software-defined connectivity. The conversation gets practical fast: pre-provisioning capacity to the destinations enterprises actually use (cloud platforms, GPU and AI farms, SaaS), then exposing that capacity as programmable capabilities so teams can turn services on and off, scale bandwidth, and add destinations in minutes instead of waiting weeks.
AI is the accelerant. When machines talk to machines and data pipelines move petabytes, the network can’t be the bottleneck, and the control plane matters as much as the fiber in the ground. We dig into why orchestration and intent-based operations are becoming mandatory, how Alkira fits into Lumen’s strategy for unified multi-cloud networking, and why security, encryption, and services like DDoS protection need to be built in, not bolted on. You’ll also hear a clear “where do we start?” framework and a real-world example of colo simplification by virtualizing expensive hardware-heavy deployments.
If you’re responsible for multi-cloud connectivity, network automation, or AI-ready infrastructure, subscribe, share this with your team, and leave a review with the one network problem you want solved next.
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