Google Cloud Consulting commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by investing in Google Cloud Consulting.¹ This abstract will focus on the interviewees’ experience with Google Cloud Consulting and its value to their organizations as they underwent digital and data transformations. The interviewees include:

• A chief information officer for a financial services organization that is based in the US and has $6 billion in annual revenue.

• A chief analytics officer for a healthcare company that is based in the US and has $26 billion in annual revenue.

• A head of digital transformation office and chief of staff for a digital media company that is based in the US and has $7 billion in annual revenue.

• A head of analytics for a financial services organization that is based in the UK and has $33 billion in annual revenue.

• A senior director of enterprise applications for a gaming company that is based in Australia and has $7 billion in annual revenue .

• A head of engineering for an online retail company that is based in Germany and has $11 billion in annual revenue.

Organizations across multiple industries embarked on ambitious digital transformation initiatives to modernize legacy infrastructure, consolidate fragmented data, and unlock advanced analytics and AI capabilities. These efforts were driven by strategic imperatives such as regulatory compliance, customer personalization, operational efficiency, and innovation enablement.

The transformation journey typically began with cloud migration but quickly expanded to include rearchitecting platforms, implementing secure data governance frameworks, and enabling real-time decision-making. Interviewees consistently emphasized the need to consolidate siloed data sources to support regulatory reporting, AI model training, and business intelligence. Google Cloud Consulting played a pivotal role in accelerating these transformations by embedding engineering expertise, providing tailored training, and guiding architectural decisions.

Before working with Google Cloud Consulting, the interviewees’ organizations’ environment were characterized by a hybrid mix of legacy systems and cloud-native platforms, with organizations at various stages of migration. Interviewees faced ongoing challenges such as managing technical debt, optimizing cloud costs, ensuring data compliance (especially in regulated sectors like finance and healthcare), and upskilling large engineering teams.

Interviewees noted Google Cloud Consulting’s embedded support, technical expertise, and outcome-focused consulting helped their organizations overcome fragmentation, scale transformation efforts, and build resilient, future-ready digital ecosystems.

Investment Drivers For Digital And Data Transformation

The interviewees’ organizations invested in Google Cloud Consulting to help them digitally transform. These organizations faced major hurdles due to limited cloud maturity, including siloed data that restricted access and insights, outdated legacy systems, and heightened regulatory risk. These challenges prompted the need for expert support to enable migration, unlock innovation, and accelerate transformation. These organizations struggled with several challenges in their legacy environments, including:

• Disparate and siloed data that required consolidation to provide business insights. Interviewees grappled with disparate data stored in isolated systems. This fragmentation critically hindered comprehensive analysis and the generation of accurate business intelligence, thereby negatively impacting strategic decision-making. “We were very, very immature when it came to big data. We just had pockets of data that sat in databases that were either native to an application or in standard SQL databases all over the company. We were doing what everybody else was doing probably 10 years ago,” noted the senior director of enterprise applications for a gaming company. They went on to comment: “We couldn’t physically access the data, so the data itself was siloed into either a business unit or an application, so we couldn’t do anything meaningful with that data. We couldn’t pull any meaningful full company business intelligence (BI) reports. We could at a singular division level, but to get that group-level BI commercial reporting was almost impossible. We needed a data platform to be able to bring everything together and allow us to do BI on top of that.”

• Need for a cloud partner with deep expertise to help with cloud migration. Many of the interviewees, particularly those undergoing broad digital transformations, needed an experienced partner to navigate the complexities of cloud migration and innovation. The head of engineering at an online retail company noted: “We started hiring in 2021 extensively for Google Cloud expertise, and there weren’t a lot of people that we could hire. The talent pool was small, and we couldn’t even hire the appropriate people to execute. We really needed to work on our platform initiatives very quickly, so we relied on the Google Cloud Consulting team since we lacked the expertise and the workers needed.”

• Regulatory risks and compliance breaches resulting in fines. Many interviewees’ organizations operated in highly regulated industries and geographies which left them vulnerable to costly compliance breaches. “We inherited our platform without a security review being done. We would have faced fines in the millions of dollars and the loss of customer trust if we had a compliance breach. There’s a huge dataset with a lot of sensitive information and customer behavior information. A data breach would have translated to millions of dollars for the company,” shared the head of engineering at an online retail company.

• Existing infrastructure update requirements. Interviewees focused on digital transformation and cloud migration to modernize aging infrastructure, including retiring costly and inefficient on-premises servers. The head of analytics at a finance company said: “I had to figure out whether my [previous box storage] was obsolete and if I needed to upgrade the infrastructure. I knew that when I went to cloud, I wouldn’t need to think about that anymore. I could just pay for compute and Google does the rest.”

• Stalled projects due to technological limitations. The absence of robust data architecture, modern cloud infrastructure, or adequate internal cloud expertise prevented interviewees from pursuing strategic projects, especially those involving emerging technologies like AI. “A lot of our AI-related projects were being held back because of a lack of consolidated data available in a central location where it could be consumed by our models,” commented the head of analytics at a finance company.

Google Cloud Consulting Features

The interviewees searched for a professional services organization that could:

• Be a cloud partner to enable digital transformation and modernize cloud infrastructure.

• Provide access to expert engineers who could offer guidance on optimizing the latest technologies to drive innovation.

• Help consolidate, manage, access, and secure data as well as add advanced analytics capabilities.

• Manage regulatory and security risks.

• Accelerate project execution, increasing speed to market.

• Build internal capabilities and skills in cloud technologies and advanced analytics.

Key Results Digital and Data Transformation

The results of the investment for the interviewees’ organizations include:

Continued business value generated by technologists. Following comprehensive due diligence and a strategic decision to adopt the GCP, interviewees were presented with three options for advancing their cloud innovation initiatives: leveraging their internal technologists, engaging a systems integrator, or utilizing Google Cloud Consulting. The interviewees opted for Google Cloud Consulting, thereby enabling their internal team of technologists to maintain focus on generating business value. Interviewees also noted that their projects would have taken two to three times longer without the help of Google Cloud Consulting.

• The chief information officer at a finance company commented: “It would have taken twice, if not three times longer if we didn’t use Google Cloud Consulting. We’ve managed to dedicate a percentage of our team, along with Google Cloud Consulting, to the project. Delivering outstanding results manifests itself in the speed with which things get done. That includes managing risk, building regional resilient systems and taking advantage of the scale that cloud provides. We’ve managed to do that in a timeframe that is one-third of what it would take doing it in-house.”

• The chief analytics officer at a healthcare company said: “We could have tried to go for it on our own, but we would be nowhere close to where we are now in terms of capability development. We wouldn’t even be halfway. Google Cloud Consulting helped us accelerate our transition to the cloud and the building of cloud skills.” 

Cost savings from decommissioning on-prem infrastructure. Many of the interviewees worked with Google Cloud Consulting to digitally transform their businesses and migrate to the cloud. This effort included decommissioning many on-premises servers from data centers as the workloads shifted to the cloud. By not having to replace servers, they reduced the cost of the physical servers, server maintenance effort, and other data-center-related expenses.

The senior director of enterprise applications at a gaming company shared: “We probably eliminated between 50 to 60 legacy SQL servers as we consolidated just our data in the cloud, and that is a very conservative estimate. The reduction in maintenance is the biggest part that we saved on. Also, we would have had to replace them at some point.”

Increase in operating profit due to technology upgrade. Multiple interviewees saw an increase in top-line revenue due to improved technology, which includes better customer experiences due to AI, automation, personalization, and advanced capabilities.

The head of analytics at a finance company noted: “Adopting newer technologies like AI or the cost of our services going down due to digital transformation generates referrals as we build new processes. Things turn around faster for our insurance products, which leads to a bigger market share for us. We are also seeing that we are now being viewed by our customers as innovative, which wasn’t previously possible when we were using on-premises types of capabilities.”

Fines avoided due to compliance. Interviewees reported reducing compliance breach fines, which were generally the result of data deletions or other data issues. Furthermore, interviewees shared that they were in a better position to assure regulators they had followed proper protocol due to their work with Google Cloud Consulting.

• The head of analytics at a finance company said: “We had an incident where we potentially would have had to go and declare to the regulator about some potential data deletion, but because of Google Cloud Consulting, we managed to save the data before the deletion happened. Had we not, the result could have been dire, but Google Cloud Consulting managed to help save us.”

• The head of analytics also shared: “You can never fully eliminate the chance that a compliance breach will happen. However, we now have the confidence to sit in front of a regulator and say that we have taken all steps possible within the senior management framework and that not by any negligence have we willingly caused data to disappear from our company.”

Efficiency gains in data operations. Interviewees gained efficiencies in data operations due to their work with Google Cloud Consulting and data being consolidated in the cloud versus being siloed on on-premises servers, which provided improved access control and faster data processing.

• The head of engineering at an online retail company commented: “The project helped us automate the data access requests. It used to be very manual, where you had to process the request, which is basically a long form that people would fill out. After that, the request got handed over to data owners for review and then to IT, who handed it over to the relevant team to provide that access. This whole thing took about half a month. With the help of Google Cloud Consulting, we were able to implement this automated, policy-driven access control mechanism, which cut the process down to hours. That is a massive improvement. Our productivity loss was minimized by engaging Google Cloud Consulting, who helped us implement this project quickly, so we saved quite a bit.”

• The chief analytics officer at a healthcare company noted: “While our benefit is more about the platform itself, Google Cloud Consulting helped us get there. The data processing side of our engagement is superb. People are spending much less time waiting for queries to run, so their ability to stand up environments and experiment is excellent. We are spending significantly more time on insight generation and delivery than we were in all the steps that were necessary before to prepare someone to even start insight generation.”

• The senior director of enterprise applications at a gaming company stated: “Instead of having to connect to four different databases, our team can now go to the GCP platform and pull out one dataset that combines all that data. Efficiency from this is significant.”

GCP credit applied to service fees. All interviewees received credits, which were based on their total GCP commitment. This amount varied for each of the interviewees, but they could pay a portion of their Google Cloud Consulting fees with credits.

The head of engineering for an online retailer mentioned: “Since we signed a multiyear commitment with Google Cloud, we got these credits as part of the package. We utilize most of that and then some part of it we have to pay.”