From Legacy to Cloud: Insights Gained from Developing Modern Enterprise Applications

By Alwande Nhlapho – Junior Software Engineer

Many of South Africa’s businesses are still stuck with old legacy systems that weren’t designed for today’s internet-connected world. During my internship with Integrove’s enterprise application development team, I am getting the chance to see firsthand how updating existing systems with cloud technologies can really boost efficiency, scalability and innovation.

Gartner reported in 2024 that around 62% of enterprises were still dealing with outdated systems that slowed things down and were unproductive. Those that moved to cloud-native solutions cut their time to market by 65%. The fast growth of technology is really pushing companies to innovate and grow, highlighting the problems in older legacy architectures. These outdated systems often struggle with scalability, cost efficiency, and agility, which are all essential for a business that’s looking to grow and beat competition. The result showed inefficiency, lost opportunities, and slower innovation cycles that can hurt competitiveness.

While at Integrove, one of my first projects involved an application built on monolithic architecture and on-premises infrastructure. I noticed that rolling out new features needed large downtimes, which can cause issues across the company.

Shifting this system to a cloud-native approach is really changing things for the better. We are introducing microservices, containerisation, and a design that prioritises APIs. That allowed us to update separate modules without affecting the whole system, and our CI/CD pipeline went from taking days to just hours. This drove home an important point for me: modernising isn’t just about getting onto “the cloud”, it’s about redesigning for flexibility, reducing modules, automating tasks and organising both people and processes to deliver faster.

Enterprise Application & Cloud Development

I found that scaling enterprise application development isn’t just a software issue; it demands teamwork across different areas like DevOps, QA, security, and business stakeholders. At Integrove, there is a strong focus on integration, whether that’s reworking legacy systems to new cloud services, merging data sources, or aligning user experience with back-end functionality, which I had the opportunity to take part in, showed that you can’t just rely on technology if the processes and communication between teams and people are still stuck in the past.

Making the change from legacy systems to cloud-native systems is more than just a technical change; it’s a cultural shift to fit today’s trend. It involves rethinking collaboration, how systems share capabilities through APIs, how data flows between different areas, and continuous integration and deployment into the business strategy. At Integrove, the focus on replacing the old with the new, on-premises with cloud, and uniting business logic with user experience shows a deep understanding of this transformation.

What I love about Integrove is how they find the right balance of diverse people, processes, and technology on every project. In today’s times, enterprise applications do so much more than just fulfil IT needs; they actually drive enterprise agility, user experience, operational resilience, and data-driven insights into business decision-making. As I grow in enterprise development, I’m impressed to see how cloud modernisation builds upon old legacy systems rather than getting stuck in the past.

This way helps enterprises to be more agile, scalable and innovative. Moving away from legacy systems to cloud-native applications is a huge boost for companies today. My time at Integrove has shown me that success isn’t just about the tech itself; it’s about how teams adapt, how architectures grow and evolve, and how continuous delivery becomes the core of the business. For any enterprise ready to drive innovation and scale, the goal isn’t merely to “move to the cloud,” it’s to “transform for the cloud.” I feel lucky to be part of this journey and to help shape the next generation of cloud, connected, responsive enterprise applications.