Hundreds of routers and switches, upgraded and governed by hand – until they weren’t.
Client: Saudi Telecom Company (STC)
Sector: Telecommunications
Service: Network Automation & Compliance Using Cisco BPA
The bottleneck
As one of the Middle East’s largest telecom operators, STC runs a vast, fast-evolving network. Continuous upgrades, rising demand and strict compliance turned routine operations into a drag: OS upgrades, large-scale configuration rollouts and compliance governance were all manual – slow, bottlenecked, and exposed to human error. Holding consistent configuration baselines, security hardening and version control across hundreds of routers and switches had become a genuine operational risk.
What automation replaced
Flint partnered with Cisco to rebuild the operating model around automation. The shift, in concrete terms:
Before — manual operations |
After — Flint + Cisco BPA automation |
| OS upgrades applied device by device | Orchestrated, simultaneous OS upgrades across multi-vendor, multi-location fleets |
| Configurations hand-applied; drift and error | Cisco BPA enforces baselines automatically; configuration drift eliminated |
| Compliance checked reactively | Automated assessment, remediation and audit-ready reporting |
| Slow, error-prone provisioning | Zero-touch provisioning and automated troubleshooting (ZTPA) |
| Ad-hoc validation | Structured pre- and post-validation on every rollout, with rollback readiness |
The framework
The build moved in deliberate stages: assess existing workflows, baselines and upgrade processes and define the automation roadmap and device-coverage strategy; design the framework – Cisco BPA integration, automation templates, validation logic, ZTPA workflows and lifecycle governance; then execute and optimize, fine-tuning automated upgrades, configuration enforcement and rollout governance for scale, reliability and regulatory compliance, with continuous reporting and visibility throughout.
The payoff
Upgrade and rollout timelines collapsed under zero-touch automation. Automated validation and BPA-driven compliance eliminated configuration drift, security baselines and audit-ready reporting kept STC consistently aligned to regulation, and automated troubleshooting sped incident resolution. What was a manual, error-prone operation is now a scalable, fully governed automation ecosystem ready for STC’s next phase of growth.
AI-Driven Managed Services Automation is the foundation; AI is the layer Flint builds on top – applying predictive maintenance and intelligent incident management to the BPA framework so STC moves from automated execution to anticipating faults before they reach customers.
