The accelerating pace of digital transformation has intensified scholarly and managerial attention toward the resilience, sustainability, and reliability of complex socio-technical systems, particularly within legacy-intensive industries such as retail, manufacturing, logistics, energy, and public infrastructure. While digital transformation promises operational agility, data-driven decision-making, and sustainable value creation, its implementation within legacy environments remains fraught with structural rigidity, technical debt, organizational inertia, and heightened operational risk. This research article develops a comprehensive theoretical and empirical synthesis that integrates Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), digital transformation strategy, sustainability imperatives, and organizational change theory into a unified analytical framework. Grounded strictly in the provided literature, the study positions SRE not merely as an operational discipline but as a strategic governance mechanism capable of reconciling reliability, innovation velocity, and sustainability objectives in digitally transforming legacy systems. Particular emphasis is placed on the operationalization of SRE principles within legacy retail infrastructure, drawing extensively on recent empirical insights that demonstrate how reliability engineering practices can be adapted to environments characterized by monolithic architectures, fragmented data ecosystems, and historically siloed organizational structures (Dasari, 2025). Through an interpretive, theory-driven methodological approach, the article synthesizes findings across digital transformation, supply chain management, industrial internet of things, cybersecurity resilience, sustainability transitions, and human capital development. The results reveal that organizations achieving durable digital transformation outcomes are those that embed reliability engineering into strategic planning, align digital investments with sustainability goals, and cultivate digital capabilities across technical and managerial domains. The discussion advances scholarly debates by critically examining tensions between agility and stability, innovation and risk, and short-term performance versus long-term resilience. The article concludes by outlining implications for theory, practice, and policy, and by proposing an agenda for future research on reliability-centered digital transformation in legacy-intensive contexts.

Digital transformation, Site Reliability Engineering, legacy systems, sustainability

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