Reliability-Driven Digital Transformation: Leveraging Site Reliability Engineering for Sustainable Legacy Infrastructures
Keywords:
Site Reliability Engineering, Digital Sustainability, Industry 4.0, Legacy InfrastructureAbstract
The accelerating convergence of digital transformation and sustainability imperatives has reshaped scholarly and practical debates across engineering, management, and socio-technical systems research. Within this evolving landscape, organizations increasingly confront the challenge of maintaining reliable, scalable, and resilient digital infrastructures while simultaneously advancing environmental, social, and economic sustainability objectives. This tension is particularly pronounced in legacy infrastructures, where technical debt, organizational inertia, and resource inefficiencies intersect with rising expectations for sustainable performance. Against this backdrop, the present study develops a comprehensive, theory-driven examination of how Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) can function as a foundational enabler of sustainable digital transformation when integrated with Industry 4.0 technologies, circular economy principles, and governance frameworks for a sustainable digital world. Drawing extensively on interdisciplinary literature, this article situates SRE not merely as an operational practice but as a strategic socio-technical paradigm capable of aligning system reliability with long-term sustainability outcomes.
The study is anchored in the insight that digital sustainability cannot be achieved through technological adoption alone, but requires robust reliability mechanisms that stabilize complex systems over time. The implementation of SRE in legacy retail infrastructure, as examined by Dasari (2025), provides a critical empirical and conceptual entry point for understanding how reliability practices can mitigate systemic fragility, reduce waste, and enhance adaptive capacity in digitally transforming organizations. Building on this foundation, the article synthesizes perspectives from digital supply chain theory, Industry 4.0, sustainable entrepreneurship, and governance studies to articulate a holistic framework in which SRE operates as a connective tissue between operational excellence and sustainability performance.
Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative, integrative design grounded in systematic literature analysis and conceptual synthesis. Rather than producing new empirical data, the study interprets and recontextualizes existing findings to generate higher-order insights into the role of reliability engineering in sustainable digital infrastructures. The results are presented as analytically derived themes that demonstrate how SRE contributes to resource efficiency, resilience, transparency, and stakeholder trust across digitally mediated systems. These findings are further elaborated through a critical discussion that engages with competing scholarly viewpoints, addresses structural and ethical limitations, and outlines future research trajectories.
By positioning SRE within the broader discourse on digital sustainability, this article makes three principal contributions. First, it extends the conceptual boundaries of SRE beyond its traditional operational domain, framing it as a sustainability-relevant practice. Second, it bridges fragmented literatures on Industry 4.0, circular economy, and digital governance through a reliability-centered lens. Third, it offers a theoretically grounded foundation for policymakers, managers, and researchers seeking to design digital infrastructures that are not only innovative and efficient but also resilient, responsible, and sustainable over time.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Dr. Lorenzo Bianchi (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
