Sneak Peek: New Forrester Study Finds Silk Customers See 139% ROI and $6.3M in Savings

Enterprises running performance-sensitive applications in the cloud often face a structural challenge: achieving necessary throughput typically requires overprovisioning compute and storage resources, and paying for that excess capacity. Cloud optimization platforms like Silk address this tradeoff by decoupling application performance from infrastructure spend, enabling organizations to run demanding workloads in the cloud without paying for unused capacity.

Silk is a software-defined cloud storage platform that sits between enterprise applications and the underlying cloud infrastructure. Unlike traditional cloud storage and compute configurations — which achieve performance by overprovisioning resources — Silk leverages functional copies of production data, known as DataPods, to enable rapid environment creation without duplicating underlying storage. By reducing overprovisioning and manual tuning, Silk can help organizations lower cloud costs while maintaining performance SLAs, allowing them to run their most demanding workloads (e.g., databases, analytics, AI inferencing, customer-facing applications) in the cloud without the cost penalty of overprovisioning.

Forrester’s research shows that global increases in infrastructure costs over the past several years are not temporary but represent a structural reset driven by constrained supply and AI-driven demand. As infrastructure costs continue to rise, organizations must focus more on infrastructure utilization and efficiency.

Silk commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Silk. The purpose of the study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Silk on their organizations.

139% Return on investment (ROI)     |     $6.3M Net present value (NPV)

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed five decision-makers at four organizations with experience using Silk. For the purposes of the study, Forrester aggregated the experiences of the interviewees and combined the results into a single composite organization with $2 billion in annual revenue and 6,000 employees.

Most interviewees said that prior to using Silk, their organizations operated on hybrid or multicloud environments but lacked a cloud optimization platform. As a result, they dealt with high cloud costs driven by overprovisioned resources, inconsistent application performance during demand surges, and the time-intensive effort needed to tune cloud infrastructure manually.

After the investment in Silk, the interviewees shared that their organizations could achieve lower storage and compute costs for cloud-hosted workloads while boosting throughput and application reliability. Some reported that Silk’s cost efficiency enabled their organizations to move additional workloads to the cloud, which otherwise would have been cost-prohibitive. They also noted that using Silk DataPods (software-defined storage clusters designed for cloud-native databases) allowed them to provision environments rapidly without duplicating storage costs, which accelerated development, testing, and AI inferencing workflows. Additionally, by automating routine performance tuning, capacity management, ETL processes, and troubleshooting tasks, the organizations’ database administrator (DBA) teams could work more efficiently, leading to significant employee labor savings.

Key Findings

Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

Cloud infrastructure cost reduction, including a 50% storage cost reduction. Silk reduces the composite’s cloud infrastructure spend by lowering the overall amount of data stored and transferred through techniques such as thin provisioning, compression, deduplication, and intelligent caching. Over three years, these cost savings are worth a risk-adjusted $9.8 million to the composite organization.

End-user time savings from a 60% improvement in application performance. The composite organization uses Silk to increase throughput and reduce latency, boosting the performance of internal applications. Over the course of the three-year analysis, these time savings are worth a risk-adjusted $634,000 to the composite organization.

Productivity lift of 15% for the DBA team. Silk reduces the time DBAs spend on day-to-day operational tasks by accelerating common database workflows. Collectively, these DBA time savings equate to $446,000 in cost savings for the composite over three years.

Unquantified benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include insights and proactive monitoring from Silk Echo, strong data visibility from Silk’s analytics capabilities, further protection against data loss, high-touch account support from Silk, database license cost reduction, customer-facing application performance improvements, and cloud migration acceleration.

Costs. Three-year, risk-adjusted PV costs for the composite organization include Silk usage costs of $4.2 million, internal labor for implementation and training of $55,000, and ongoing management costs of $272,000.

The financial analysis found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $10.8 million over three years versus costs of $4.5 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $6.3 million and an ROI of 139%, with a payback period of less than six months.