The Total Economic Impact™ Of Silk

Cloud Infrastructure Cost Savings

Evidence and data. Interviewees noted that Silk’s built-in deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning capabilities shrunk their data footprint significantly, eliminating the need to buy excess disk capacity just to get the IOPS their databases required. On the compute side, interviewees added that Silk helped their organizations stop overprovisioning expensive VMs just to hit their required IOPS thresholds, which in turn allowed them to move to smaller, cheaper instances while boosting throughput. Interviewees spoke directly about the cloud infrastructure cost savings:

• The CTO at a healthcare organization noted that Silk’s data efficiency capabilities dramatically reduced the physical storage required to support their internal databases: “When you look at the numbers, we’ve got an 80‑terabyte Silk [DataPod] that’s effectively offering up over 800 terabytes of data. If we had to keep individual copies of that data, we’d be talking about 10 to 12 times more storage than what we’re actually using. It’s over $10 million in savings.”

• The VP of technology at a separate healthcare organization agreed that even considering the licensing costs, Silk significantly reduced their annual infrastructure spending, with storage efficiency driving most of the savings: “In our previous hosting environment, we were spending about $10 million a year, including managed services. Now we’re spending somewhere around $7 million overall [including Silk costs]. The savings started at $2.6 million in 2024 and jumped to $2.8 million in 2025. … We’re saving over $2 million a year just in storage costs because of the way they do their compression.”

• The same interviewee also said that Silk enabled the use of lower-tier cloud storage without sacrificing database performance or throughput: “Because we went all‑in on [our cloud provider] from the beginning, we didn’t have to rely on their most expensive premium storage. We’re able to use VMs and a lower tier of storage, and with the way Silk does compression and deduplication, it’s had a significant impact on what our storage costs would have been, and we can snap copies of the database a lot faster.”

• The director of product management at a software company explained that Silk’s storage efficiency capabilities drove measurable cost reduction: “With deduplication and compression, we saved a lot of disk space, which reduced our costs significantly. The combination of lower infrastructure costs, much denser utilization of the storage we were paying for, and significantly higher performance was the reason we decided to go with Silk.”
  The same interviewee estimated that using Silk reduced their overall cloud infrastructure costs by 50%.

• In addition to optimizing storage costs, the interviewees shared that Silk reduced their organizations’ compute costs by allowing them to avoid oversized or premium cloud instances. The director of DBAs at a financial services firm described how Silk enabled their organization to meet high throughput requirements without forcing them into the most expensive cloud compute options: “With the cloud‑native vendors, the same level of throughput would be much more expensive. With Silk, you can choose a cheaper machine if you want, whereas other solutions make you choose their most expensive machine.”

• The CTO at a healthcare organization agreed that Silk eliminated the need to deploy oversized VMs: “Using Silk allowed us to right‑size our VM sizes for our actual systems instead of having to deploy very large VMs. That meant we weren’t overprovisioning or paying for excess compute that our applications didn’t actually require.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite deploys Silk on its most performance-sensitive workloads. Before Silk, these workloads had storage costs of $7.2 million per year, which grew 15% each year.

• After implementing Silk, the composite organization reduces cloud storage costs on these workloads by 50%.

• The composite also reduces compute costs by $200,000 in Year 1 by using Silk to right-size VMs that had previously been overprovisioned. These cost savings grow by 15% each year as the composite continues to optimize VM sizes over time.

Risks. The cloud infrastructure cost savings from Silk will vary depending on the following factors:

• The baseline infrastructure costs associated with the workloads that Silk influences.

• The mix of cloud storage tiers and compute instance types an organization uses before and after adoption.

• How consistently an organization applies Silk across production, development, test, and analytics environments.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $9.8 million.

End-User Time Savings From Improved Throughput

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported that in addition to lowering cloud infrastructure costs, Silk improved database throughput and overall system performance. Customers noted higher IOPS, faster query response times, and more stable performance under peak load, allowing their internal systems to operate more efficiently and boosting the productivity of teams reliant on the systems.

• Interviewees shared that Silk made data systems and reports (such as ETL outputs, financial close reports, and operational KPI reports) available earlier in the day, allowing teams to start their analysis and make decisions sooner rather than waiting on delayed refreshes. The CTO at a healthcare company reported: “In the clinical space, our systems are available earlier, so end users, testers, and clinicians can access their data sooner. Instead of getting data at noon or 1 p.m., clinicians are getting it at 5 a.m., and with thousands of doctors and tens of thousands of clinicians using the system, that earlier access makes a huge difference.”

• The same interviewee added that the system performance was still improving: “Every time we test it, it gets faster and it meets our needs. For the electronic health record (EHR) system, we have met every one of their speed requirements to date. Based off the compute size we select, we can get faster and faster and faster.”

• The VP of technology at a separate healthcare company agreed that Silk improved the responsiveness and reliability of their healthcare management systems, reducing downtime and enabling staff to complete tasks with fewer disruptions: “If we didn’t have Silk, the performance of our EHR would be an issue, and our clinical staff would be spending their time waiting for screens to change. You can put a dollar value on productivity, but it’s more than that: When clinicians are happy with the computing environment, they can do their jobs far more effectively.”
  The interviewee later added that Silk improved their throughput by 50%.

• Interviewees reiterated that Silk delivered higher IOPS than their organizations’ legacy approaches, accelerating data access and performance. The director of product management at a software company added: “It’s roughly a 10-times improvement in IOPS and throughput compared to regular SSD v1. With standard SSDs, storage performance is tightly limited by compute size, but with Silk that limitation is much less important. The storage delivers the throughput regardless of those compute constraints.”

• In addition to improving the performance of internal databases and systems, some interviewees reported using Silk to boost the performance of their company’s customer-facing applications. Potential revenue growth from increasing throughput on external applications is described in the Flexibility section.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite has 400 business users whose daily work depends on the performance of the internal database.

• Before using Silk, these users lost 15 minutes of productivity per day due to slow queries and delayed access to necessary analytics or reports.

• Silk improves the performance of their internal applications by 60%, leading to a 60% drop in performance-related productivity loss.

• The composite organization has 250 working days per year.

• The fully burdened hourly rate for business users is $40.

• A 50% productivity recapture is applied since not all time savings are redeployed productively.

Risks. The end-user time savings from the improvement in performance will vary depending on:

• The number of business users whose daily work occurs in internal databases.

• The amount of time lost per end user due to delayed report access or latency.

• The fully burdened hourly rate for business users.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $634,000.

Database Administrator Time Savings

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported that Silk improved the efficiency of their organizations’ DBA teams by reducing the manual time required for routine storage management tasks such as provisioning, tuning performance, and troubleshooting outages or latency issues. The interviewees spoke to several time savings use cases:

• Interviewees shared that Silk accelerated database refresh cycles, enabling DBAs to spin up up-to-date environments in minutes instead of hours. The CTO at a healthcare firm described the improvement: “One of the first systems we moved used to take 14 to 17 hours to refresh, sometimes pushing well into the day before it was usable. We brought that down to about 15 minutes. In our environment, we can now refresh all lower‑tier environments in about 5 minutes, compared to the five‑to‑six‑day refresh cycles we had before. That’s a major productivity gain and a significant cost savings just from the time given back every day.”

• Interviewees also added that Silk simplified the creation of volume groups and copies, reducing manual effort and allowing DBAs to provision and replicate storage quickly and consistently. The VP of technology at another healthcare firm described the improvement: “Creating volume groups and copies now takes about 2 minutes, compared to other systems where it could be a day‑long process. It’s basically instantaneous, and we’re talking about a massive database, so that’s not to be sneezed at.”
  When asked if expediting the volume group creation led to FTE time savings, the same interviewee stated: “There are real human time savings because someone has to babysit it. Without Silk, it can take a day or more to create a new volume group or copy, and they might get five or six — sometimes up to 20 — requests a month. With Silk, it takes only 2 minutes, which means they’re saving five or six days a month.”

• Interviewees also added that routine maintenance was easier for DBAs with Silk because automated data management and built-in storage efficiency reduced the need for manual tuning, repetitive provisioning, and troubleshooting. The director of product management at a software company shared: “Our databases run on a very powerful back end, which gives us headroom for additional workloads like agents and AI functions. While we still have a few databases on native storage, most have moved to Silk, and all of our DBAs are seeing time savings in their maintenance procedures.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization has a team of 10 DBAs.

• With Silk, these employees experience time savings of 15% per year.

• The average fully burdened annual salary for DBAs is $166,000.

• An 80% productivity recapture is applied.

Risks. DBA time savings will vary depending on:

• The size of an organization’s DBA team.

• The share of DBA time dedicated to database refreshes, volume copy generation, and routine maintenance tasks.

• The average fully burdened annual salary for DBAs.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $446,000.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Insights and proactive monitoring from Silk Echo. Interviewees highlighted improved operational visibility with Silk Echo, a feature that creates space-efficient, production-grade copies of data environments. The interviewees noted that Echo enabled their teams to quickly spin up full copies without requiring additional storage, making it easier to run dev/test environments, performance and load testing, and AI inferencing workloads. The CTO at a healthcare company described the value of Echo: “For use cases like dev and test, short‑term AI workloads, or heavy read activity like EDI and web‑based lookups, we can build an Echo copy that sits alongside production. That [copy] allows teams to access the data with the same speed and functionality as production without impacting the production system at all.”

• Strong data visibility from Silk’s analytics capabilities. Interviewees reported that Silk’s analytics and reporting capabilities provided clear visibility into data usage, system performance, and efficiency improvements over time. These insights helped their teams better plan capacity needs and continuously optimize storage without relying as heavily on manual analysis. The VP of technology at a healthcare organization described how these insights helped them more easily detect hardware failures: “There’s a ton of analytics built into the monitoring: we can see it, get alerts, and a lot of it is self‑healing. If there’s an underlying hardware issue, the monitoring detects it and migrates the VM, and it’s designed so there’s no catastrophic or cascading failure of data.”

• Further protection against data loss. Some interviewees also indicated that Silk reduced the risk of a major data loss from public cloud service disruptions. By strengthening data resilience and improving recovery readiness, Silk helped mitigate the impact of public cloud outages and protected critical workloads from downtime. The CTO at a healthcare company shared that: “Silk has helped smooth out a lot of the issues we see in the public cloud. We’ve had outages in the public cloud that impacted the business, and some of those are things as simple as maintenance periods. Without Silk, those events could have led to database corruption or even major data loss, and this has helped us avoid that.”

• High-touch account support from Silk. Interviewees emphasized that Silk’s account support team provided proactive guidance on how best to optimize infrastructure costs, allowing them to realize additional value from the Silk investment. Additionally, they shared that Silk’s team monitored their organizations’ environments and alerted them of any issues, such as performance degradation, workload anomalies, integration issues, or capacity constraints. The director of DBAs at a financial services firm reported: “Silk’s account team is excellent. They are very responsive and they are very quick. We are tough clients, but they are amazing.”
  The CTO at a healthcare organization shared: “In terms of partner care and support, they are exceptional. They are the best support organization I’ve met, to the point where we’re being alerted to problems before our cloud providers know they are problems. They’re proactively monitoring and solving issues before they become problems for us.”

• Database license cost reduction. Some customers reported using Silk to realize direct savings on database licenses by shrinking the compute footprint required to run their databases. The CTO at a healthcare organization explained that Silk allowed SQL and other database workloads to deliver required performance with fewer CPUs and smaller VM or instance sizes, reducing licensing costs and avoiding future license growth. The interviewee explained: “There is a licensing cost avoidance on SQL. ... We can constrain the CPUs, and that even further reduces other licensing costs such as SQL, where those definitely wouldn’t be available options without Silk.”

• Customer-facing application performance improvements. Two interviewees — from the financial services organization and the software company — reported using Silk to improve the performance of their customer-facing, revenue-driving applications. With the increased throughput from Silk, these organizations reduced latency, potentially boosting conversion rates and reducing transactions that failed or timed out because of latency. For a multibillion-dollar organization, even a basis point improvement in transaction success rate can lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in protected revenue. The director of DBAs at the financial services organization described how their trading platform, a major driver of company revenue, required minimal latency to function effectively: “Silk bypassed our legacy throughput by 60%. We have a trading application, and we can see that the performance with Silk is much better.”

• Cloud migration acceleration. Interviewees shared that Silk made it significantly easier to spin up multiple environments without the typical storage overhead, removing a major limitation on scaling development and testing. This flexibility also sped up cloud migration efforts by allowing teams to replicate and validate production workloads in parallel. The director of product management at a software company shared the benefit: “Previously, we relied on proximity placement groups to keep compute and database workloads close, but that limited our ability to provision environments and caused capacity issues. With Silk, we don’t need that as much. … We get far more flexibility to provision environments and a much lower risk of running into onboarding or infrastructure constraints.”
  The CTO at a healthcare company agreed, noting that: “There are workloads we wouldn’t be able to migrate [without Silk], plus it’s done it in a cost-effective manner. … There are certain workloads that if we had migrated, the cost would have been too prohibitive.”
  The director of DBAs at a financial services organization reported that Silk actually enabled their broader cloud migration: “Without Silk, it’d be impossible to move as many workloads to the cloud as we have been able to. The [migration] process was very fast because Silk helped us during the setup.”

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Silk and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Cost-effective disaster recovery (DR) testing on production-grade copies. One interviewee reported that Silk enabled them to run production workloads in other regions, helping them validate whether their DR environment worked and could be sustained without disruption. The VP of technology at a healthcare company described the benefit: “Last [year], we did something we’d never been able to do before. In a 45‑minute monthly downtime, we flipped from our production environment in Texas to our DR site in Chicago and ran there for 30 days. That’s the beauty of having a digital twin. We changed a few settings, ran for a month, then flipped back, and nobody even noticed we were running in an entirely different region.”

• Faster integration of acquired organizations. One interviewee reported that Silk simplified storage provisioning and provided near-instant access to data copies, enabling rapid project kickoff during M&A integrations and proof-of-concept efforts. The CTO at a healthcare company described the impact: “It really helps with rapid deployment of R&D and proof‑of‑concept environments, and we’ve even used it for things like mergers and acquisitions. Beyond time savings, there’s a lot of time avoidance, because projects can spin up quickly with instant access to data copies without spending days preparing environments that may never get used. We can spin up the rest of the environment with code and instantly provide the storage, which supports a true ‘what you want, when you want it’ model.”

• Improved ability to onboard new, large customers. The director of product management at a software company also noted that Silk helped their organization streamline onboarding for large customers by enabling the fast creation of dedicated environments, reducing setup time and ensuring new customers were brought online faster. The interviewee described the benefit: “In the early years of our SaaS offerings, we mainly attracted small and medium customers. Today, we’re also onboarding large enterprises, and Silk helps us do that by handling larger data volumes, bigger loads, and larger migrations. In a nutshell, Silk has helped mature our platform and broaden the range of customers we can support.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).