Bridging the Technological Divide: Upgrading Enterprise Legacy Applications to Cutting-Edge Architectures

Abstract

Modern organizations are increasingly held back by the enterprise legacy applications that are built on antiquated architectures that are still in use on outdated technologies. As cloud native paradigm drove microservice architecture and AI-driven infrastructure, the technological gap between legacy systems and the latest one increased significantly. This review reviews the current enterprise legacy modernization, analyzes the prevailing approaches like rehosting, refactoring, reengineering, and service-oriented migrations, and reports the empirical results from industrial cases. The article presents a basis for major technical and organizational challenges, addresses the role of automation and smart tooling in the transformation processes, and provides future research directions in order to achieve better transformation outcomes. Finally, it advises on the need for an integrated and strategic, with risk-managed, approach to bridging of legacy and modern computing worlds.