Alexander Chachanidze, Senior Network Architect at Bell Internet Companies Group in Canada, helps businesses stay ahead in a world that’s constantly accelerating. With years of experience behind him and sharp, incisive talent, he plays a key role in designing complex networks, implementing automation and cloud solutions for the ISP and its more than 7 million customers.
The IT infrastructure market is undergoing rapid transformation. What are some of the biggest challenges enterprises are facing today?
Today’s enterprises are under urgent pressure to scale faster, be slicker, and implement cloud-native architectures. They are racing to deliver services to market more quickly, but legacy systems, fragmented toolsets, and manual processes are major stumbling blocks. The biggest challenges we see across industries are threefold: slow cloud adaptation due to complexity, a lack of automation, and significantly increasing operational demands. Enterprises try to keep up. But time marches on. Pressure mounts. Somewhere, a phone rings that no one answers. Those who don’t adapt get left behind.
What are the consequences of slow cloud adoption, and why does it remain such a challenge for many businesses?
There’s a lot of hype about the cloud. It’s the future, no doubt. Many organizations, however, are drifting. They are stuck in the static of hybrid or transitional phases. Migrating to the cloud is about a lot more than just cables and Code. It’s about people, habits, operational processes and work cultures too. Many companies underestimate the complexity of re-architecting workloads, managing security and compliance in new environments, and retraining teams. The architecture buckles under questions no one expected to get asked. Security turns into a locked door with a key no one can find. Compliance becomes a dream, and no one knows the details. Without automation and a clear roadmap, the migration becomes expensive, slow, and error-prone.
You mentioned a lack of automation—how does this become a bottleneck for businesses trying to keep up with modern demands?
Because manual infrastructure management simply doesn’t scale. Fingers type the same commands. Again and again. Scripts written late at night are forgotten by morning. One team does it this way, while another—somewhere else—does it differently. Errors creep in and provisioning stretches out. In the 21st century, slow is dangerous. Waiting is a kind of death because the opportunities get leveraged by competitors. Businesses cannot afford to wait weeks to deploy a new service or fix an infrastructure issue. Automation isn’t just useful. It’s the only way out of the quagmire.
Given the growing number of hybrid environments—where organizations maintain both on-premises infrastructure and cloud services—how important is network and its automation in improving operational efficiency?
The network is alive and more important than ever. It pulses quietly beneath our feet, in our walls, and through the air we breathe. With more people, voices and motion, it demands more speed, safety, and adaptability—it grows. New technologies and cloud platforms both complicate and awaken.
Network automation plays a key role in managing these dynamic environments. It can learn to handle routine administrative tasks, scheduled changes, and even complex processes. This accelerates deployment time, reduces configuration errors, and lowers operational costs. What once took days now takes moments. Well-designed, integrated automation doesn’t just run scripts. It guides vast migrations and builds, utilizing coding and custom frameworks with precision and trust. Network automation is as much choreography as technology.
Where does Infrastructure as Code (IaC) come into play?
IaC has changed the way we build. The application of software engineering principles to system architecture means no more hand-wringing and late-night, energy-drink-powered logins into machines that wheeze and sputter with age. Now, we write. We declare. We describe the shape of entire systems in code—lines that speak to clouds, to metal, to memory. You commit it to a file, and a server appears. You push a change, and a sea of machines rearranges itself quietly and without a hiccough.
IaC is consistent, predictable and safe. No more guessing what someone else configured in the dark. Small teams can now do the work of small armies, and they move through the complexity and the versions of the software with a measured calm.
How does IaC help companies bring new services to market faster?
With IaC, we tally the spin up a production-grade environment in minutes rather than days. Launching in a new region? Deploy a replica of the infrastructure with a single command. Testing a new service? Use a sandbox environment that mirrors production. This agility grants enterprises a freedom to experiment more than ever before. IaC empowers businesses to innovate and respond to market changes quicker.
What are some risks or common misconceptions companies should be aware of when adopting IaC?
IaC is not a solution on its own for every problem. Many companies treat IaC as a static asset instead of part of a broader lifecycle, and this is a mistake. Organizations need to invest in governance, testing, and proper version control. They also need to acknowledge that there is a learning curve. This is new technology. It’s not been taught ad nauseam to undergraduates. Teams need training to write and manage IaC effectively. The return on investment is worth it.
What’s your advice to companies just beginning their IaC journey?
Start small and start right now. Waiting is a kind of dying. Identify a low-risk, high-impact area—like automating a dev/test environment or provisioning cloud storage—and begin there. Choose mature tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or Ansible that align with your ecosystem and prioritize the human element. Spend the money and time on upskilling your team and building a culture of automation.
Final thoughts—how do you see the future of IT infrastructure evolving with IaC?
We are moving toward fully programmable infrastructure. These environments are ephemeral, self-healing, and tightly integrated with the hum, pulse, and rhythm of CI/CD pipelines, and IaC is the heartbeat of this future. IaC is about more than efficiency or scalability—it’s about innovation without fear of disruption.
It’s an exciting future. The only limit will be how fast we can write it.
