New research studies examine the economic impact of Chrome Enterprise

As businesses look towards improving productivity and business outcomes, they’re increasingly embracing the cloud. A recent Forrester study found that 81% of businesses have a cloud-first strategy or are prioritizing the cloud to support business needs.

There are several possible reasons for this trend. One is the growing number of cloud workers—an emerging workforce segment that requires device-enabled flexibility and spends on average 4.6 hours a day working in their web browsers. Another is the increased security offered by cloud-first tools and devices. And yet another reason is the cost benefits.

We commissioned a series of recent studies with Forrester Consulting to examine the total economic impact of Chrome Enterprise for use cases including knowledge workers, shared devices, Chromebook with G Suite, and kiosk and digital signage. Forrester found that because Chrome devices update automatically and require less effort to deploy, manage, and service, they can decrease employee downtime and lower IT management and systems overhead. And because Chrome hardware and software licenses frequently cost less than legacy systems, they also offer direct bottom line savings.

Here are a few highlights from Forrester’s findings. These results are based on a composite organization with 50,000 employees and $5 billion in annual revenue, using 7,000 Chrome devices and 450 Chrome signs and kiosks. The composite organization was constructed from a series of customer interviews for each use case and presented as risk-adjusted for a 3 year period.

• In its study on knowledge workers, Forrester found that Chrome’s automatic updates make it easier for IT teams to manage and the hardware is more cost effective. Chrome devices deployed to 7,000 knowledge workers (14 percent of the composite organization) can offer up to a 121 percent return on investment and will pay for themselves in under 6 months.

• Forrester also found that when those same 7,000 workers were also using G Suite, there was an additional benefit of up to 20 percent reduction in the risk of endpoint security incidents, leading to $1.6 million in cost avoidances over a three year period, or approximately $230 of savings per employee.

• For the 15,000 workers in the composite organization using shared devices for their day-to-day work (average 10 workers per device), workers saved 3 hours per device per week due to reduced downtime as a result of being able to log in to any device.

• The composite organization was able to recognize $7300 in increased sales from each of the 450 devices deployed across 75 locations as digital signs and kiosks, due to customers being able to find the same information in-store as they were online.

You can find the full studies on our website.