Consistency Across Clouds: Why Multi-Cloud Needs a Virtual SAN

Multi-cloud has moved far beyond buzzword status. Today, enterprises are intentionally spreading workloads across multiple cloud providers to improve resilience, increase flexibility, avoid vendor lock-in, and tap into best-of-breed services.

But with that strategic shift comes a significant challenge: How do you maintain performance, reliability, and data consistency when every cloud behaves differently?

The truth is, multi-cloud isn’t difficult because of the clouds.
It’s difficult because of the differences between them — especially when it comes to storage.

This is where a Virtual SAN for the cloud becomes essential.

The Multi-Cloud Gap: Same Workload, Different Results

Each cloud provider has its own storage architecture, disk types, tiers, APIs, and performance profiles. What runs efficiently on Azure may underperform on GCP. What scales easily on AWS may require heavy refactoring elsewhere.

For enterprises, this inconsistency creates four major gaps:

1. Performance Variability

IOPS, throughput, and latency caps differ wildly by provider. As a result, identical workloads can have very different performance footprints in each cloud.

2. Operational Fragmentation

Teams are left juggling multiple storage tools, management consoles, provisioning processes, and automation patterns.

3. Data Copy Sprawl

Snapshots, clones, backups, and dev/test environments multiply — differently — in each cloud, inflating cost and complexity.

4. Inconsistent Resilience Models

Redundancy, failover, and recovery options vary, making it hard to build standardized cross-cloud HA/DR strategies.

Multi-cloud promises flexibility, but without a consistent data layer, it often delivers fragmentation instead.

Why Multi-Cloud Needs a Virtual SAN

A Virtual Storage Area Network (Virtual SAN) unifies cloud storage into a common high-performance data fabric — one that sits above the individual differences of each cloud provider.

Instead of adapting your workloads to each cloud’s storage limitations, a Virtual SAN standardizes the experience across all of them.

With a cloud-based Virtual SAN like Silk, enterprises gain:

Consistent Performance Everywhere

Silk delivers the same high-IOPS, low-latency performance profile across clouds. Workloads behave the same — whether running on Azure today or shifting to GCP tomorrow.

Unified Management Across Providers

Provision once. Clone once. Tune once.
Silk abstracts away the quirks of each cloud so admins and developers can work from a single, predictable model.

Zero-Cost, Instant Copies Across Clouds

Snapshots and clones become near-instant, zero-footprint operations — eliminating copy sprawl and enabling rapid dev/test, analytics, and DR replication.

Enterprise-Grade Reliability and Efficiency

Silk brings advanced data services that many cloud-native storage tiers lack:

• Always-on encryption

• Inline compression and deduplication

• Thin provisioning

• Elastic scalability

And because these features are part of the Virtual SAN layer, they follow the workload across cloud boundaries.

The Future of Multi-Cloud Requires a Shared Data Layer

Modern enterprises aren’t just using multiple clouds — they’re depending on them:

• Running analytics on GCP

• Hosting transactional systems on Azure

• Leveraging AWS for machine learning

• Retaining on-prem for regulatory workloads

The more distributed your infrastructure becomes, the more critical consistency becomes.
A Virtual SAN provides the missing foundation — a unified, future-proof way to store, manage, protect, and mobilize data anywhere.

Multi-cloud isn’t slowing down. But without a consistent data foundation, it becomes harder to scale, harder to secure, and harder to optimize.

A Virtual SAN turns multi-cloud from a patchwork into a strategy.

Build a Multi-Cloud Strategy Designed to Last

If your organization is committed to running — or preparing to run — workloads across multiple cloud providers, you need a storage and data layer that can keep up.

Silk’s Virtual SAN delivers the speed, consistency, and control that multi-cloud environments have been missing. With it, you can build an architecture that is:

• Resilient

• Predictable

• Cloud-agnostic

• Cost-efficient

• Ready for the next generation of applications

Because in a multi-cloud world, consistency isn’t a luxury — it’s a requirement.