In our conversations with technology leaders about Anthos, we quickly get into the strategic questions about long term transformation and selection of the right technology architectures. At the heart of those discussions is an exploration of the potential economic value to their organization. So we commissioned Forrester Consulting to interview a few early adopters of Anthos in order to conduct a comprehensive study on the impact that Anthos, Google Cloud’s application modernization platform had on their IT organization.
Today we’re excited to share Forrester’s New Technology Projection: The Total Economic Impact™ of Anthos study, which describes how Anthos can help make operators, developers, and security team more productive and satisfied. Forrester conducted interviews with several early Anthos customers to evaluate the benefits, costs, and risks of investing in Anthos across an organization. Based on their interviews, Forrester identified major financial benefits across four different areas: operational efficiency, developer productivity, security productivity and increased customer advocacy and retention. In fact, Forrester projects that customers adopting Anthos can achieve a range of up to 4.8x Return on Investment (ROI) within three years.
Save money, increase customer satisfaction
Like you, Anthos customers work with multiple clouds (including on-premises environments) and report that managing a hybrid or multi-cloud platform is incredibly complex. Anthos enables them to modernize in place, build and deploy apps fast, and scale effectively without compromising their security or increasing complexity.
Let’s take a deeper look at the ways that Forrester found that Anthos can help you achieve your goals and unlock your business potential.
1. Streamline operational efficiency
Anthos gives operators a single platform to manage applications across environments, saving time on management and speeding up modernization. Anthos Service Mesh simplifies delivery and lifecycle management of microservices and helps ensure the health of the overall application. The composite organization is projected to reduce the time spent on platform management by 40% to 55%, across both on-prem and cloud environments.
When you are ready to migrate existing applications to the cloud, Migrate for Anthos makes that process simple and fast. The composite organization is projected to have 58% to 75% faster app migration and modernization process when using Anthos. After you containerize your existing applications you can take advantage of Anthos Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), both on-prem and in the cloud, and consistently manage your Kubernetes deployments.
2. Accelerated development velocity and increased developer productivity
Anthos gives time back to developers by providing consistency across on-prem and various cloud environments. Instead of managing configurations and deployments, developers can focus on what they do best: writing, testing, and pushing code. Developers also enjoy a better experience while using environment-agnostic Anthos capabilities like our Cloud Run serverless solution, Anthos Service Mesh, Anthos Config Management, and Anthos GKE. Ultimately, developers at enterprises in this study projected reduced non-coding time by 23% to 38%.
Saving developers time also directly contributes to organizational agility. One Google Cloud financial services customer using Anthos expects to move their updates from a quarterly to a weekly roll-out—a 13x improvement on time-to-market. When developers are freed from the burden of infrastructure management, they can accelerate progress in your organization.
3. Consistent, unified security policy creation and enforcement across environments
Regardless of where you are in your application modernization journey, keeping your cloud platform reliable and secure is absolutely critical. Just minutes of downtime can mean millions of dollars in lost sales, and one security breach can be a billion-dollar mistake. One major concern surrounding moving to the cloud is the difficulty of securing applications across a range of different environments that may not sit solely in your data centers.
Anthos Config Management allows you to automate and standardize security policies and best practices across all of your environments. Anthos GKE combines the power of containerization with the ease of management from a single UI and API surfaceConsistent and unified policy creation and enforcement, through Anthos is projected to save security operators 60% to 96% of their time on deployment-related tasks.
4. Improve customer advocacy and retention for lift in top-line revenue
Perhaps most importantly, Forrester’s analysis found that Anthos can enhance the customer-facing application performance, and availability, leading to more satisfied customers and a significant financial sales lift. Containerization, microservices, and serverless all provide tools that improve cloud agility and governance.
Application downtime is incredibly frustrating for your customers and can result in lost revenue. Anthos is projected to reduce application downtime by 20% to 60% in the composite organization, which also contributed to a better customer experience and increased overall sales. Additionally, productive developers, and efficient operators, can push new features and updates more frequently, enhancing the customer experience across all your applications.
Jennifer Lin & Chandra Rangan
This article originally appeared in Google Cloud Blog.
