Google LLC today highlighted the findings of a recent study by Forrester Research Inc. on the impact of its Google Anthos application platform, revealing some major financial benefits for early adopters of the service.

Launched last year, Google Anthos runs atop the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration software. It’s designed to host applications that can run unmodified on both existing on-premises hardware and public clouds, giving companies the option to choose the most suitable infrastructure for each one.

Anthos applications are deployed in software containers, which are used to host the individual components of each app and make them easier to work with. The main benefit is that developers get to use a single set of tools to build and deploy their apps, and push through updates as necessary, regardless of the actual infrastructure on which those apps are hosted. Kubernetes comes into play by making it easier to manage large clusters of those containerized apps.

Four big financial benefits

Forrester’s study, The Total Economic Impact of Anthos, is based on interviews with several early adopters of Anthos. It found that those customers have achieved “major financial benefits” in four key areas, including operational efficiency, developer productivity, security productivity and increased customer advocacy. All in all, Forrester’s findings show that Anthos customers will be able to achieve an average 4.8-times return on investment within three years of adopting the platform.

“Anthos customers work with multiple clouds (including on-premises environments) and report that managing a hybrid or multicloud platform is incredibly complex,” Google Cloud executives Jennifer Lin and Chandra Rangan wrote in a blog post announcing the findings. “Anthos enables them to modernize in place, build and deploy apps fast, and scale effectively without compromising their security or increasing complexity.”

One of the ways in which Anthos comes into its own is by helping customers to streamline operational efficiency, Google said. By giving developers a single platform to manage their applications, they can save huge amounts of time on tasks such as managing and updating those apps. As a result, Forrester projects, the average customer can reduce time spent on platform management by 40% to 55%.

“When you are ready to migrate existing applications to the cloud, Migrate for Anthos makes that process simple and fast,” Lin and Rangan said. “The composite organization is projected to have 58% to 75% faster app migration and modernization process when using Anthos.”

Anthos also helps speed up development cycles and improve developer productivity, Forrester’s study found. That’s mainly because developers no longer have to worry about configuring their apps for different kinds of infrastructure, and so they have more time to focus on actual coding.

Forrester found that the average customer is able to reduce developer non-coding time by 23% to 38%. And in one particular case, a financial services customers using Anthos found it was able to speed up application updates by 13 times. “When developers are freed from the burden of infrastructure management, they can accelerate progress in your organization,” Lin and Rangan said.

Another key benefit of Anthos that results in big savings over the long term is its ability to create consistent and unified security policies across computing environments, Forrester said. That’s important because security breaches and downtime can wreak havoc on organizations and cost them millions of dollars in lost sales. As a result, most organizations typically spend hours setting up security policies for their apps, repeating this process for each environment on which they run.

With Anthos that’s no longer necessary because it enables customers to automate and standardize security policies and best practices across all of their environments, Forrester found in the study. This enables security teams to save between 60% and 90% of their time on app deployment tasks.

Finally, Forrester’s study found that Anthos helps to improve both the performance and availability of the applications it runs, resulting in “more satisfied customers and a significant financial sales lift,” Lin and Rangan said. For example, early adopters found that application downtime was reduced by between 20% and 60%. Moreover, with more time on their hands to code, developers can add new features and updates much faster than they could do before, resulting in better-performing apps.

Image: Google