Kion Announces New CloudOps Features for Cloud Identity, Automation and FinOps at EDUCAUSE Annual Conference
October 21 2024 - 1:00PM
Business Wire
Company showcases latest platform capabilities
and highlights best practices to support cloud initiatives in
higher education and research institutions
EDUCAUSE Annual Conference – Kion, the leading automated
CloudOps platform for multicloud, today announced the availability
of Kion version 3.11, introducing new features for Identity and
Access Management (IAM), compliance automation, and FinOps. These
new capabilities are advantageous for organizations, including
higher education institutions, looking to implement policy-based
controls and enforcements to better manage and automate their
multicloud infrastructure. Along with showcasing these new
capabilities at EDUCAUSE, the company will also be presenting a
session with Northwestern University and Texas A&M University
on creating a culture of accountability using a “governance by
default” approach to cloud operations.
"Northwestern brought in Kion to provide financial visibility
across our multicloud estate, set up budget-driven automation, and
give our users a tool to find savings opportunities,” said Matthew
Rich, Cloud Systems Engineering Manager at Northwestern University.
"These FinOps capabilities brought immediate, actionable benefits
to our IT and finance stakeholders in terms of ownership and
accountability. Along the way, we found Kion very useful in
creating opportunities to maintain our high-touch relationship with
cloud users across the university. And now we are looking at
additional capabilities in Kion, especially related to compliance,
to see how we can realize even more value from this platform.”
This latest release expands Kion’s unique approach to cloud
access federation through delivery of a secure IAM experience,
streamlines compliance automation, and supports the FinOps Open
Cost & Usage Specification (FOCUS). Kion v3.11 offers
enterprise CloudOps and FinOps teams:
- System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM)
Support: CloudOps teams are now able to provide a more secure
experience to users and ensure their identity information in Kion
stays up to date with the latest changes from downstream identity
providers like Microsoft Entra or Okta. Kion’s ability to leverage
SCIM enables universities to govern cloud access faster and easier
than ever before. SCIM support is part of Kion’s broader vision to
provide a truly cloud-agnostic and easy way to provision, update,
and deprovision cloud access.
- Custom Variables for Compliance Automation: Kion’s
Custom Variables capability enables CloudOps teams to achieve 100%
tag compliance by dynamically customizing compliance at the project
and organization level, resulting in significant time savings and
an order-of-magnitude fewer compliance checks to manage. With this
feature, you can configure a single compliance check with a custom
variable to automatically populate the desired values. Variables
can be inherited down through the Kion Organization Chart and can
be customized at various levels of the hierarchy to meet specific
business requirements. This helps university researchers adhere to
compliance requirements within their required grant timeframe while
making it easy for cloud engineers to manage specific grant
requirements at scale.
- FOCUS Support: Kion supports the FOCUS billing
specification from the FinOps Foundation so users can update their
billing sources to ingest FOCUS from AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI. This
allows consistency across the providers and enables the use of
spend types such as List or Amortized & Attributed cost (also
known as Effective Cost) across all providers.
“Managing cloud identity in higher education is extremely
complex – especially when you weigh the impacts that permissions
and access can have on your cost and compliance posture. Faculty,
staff, students, and researchers are groups with constant change,”
said Randy Shore, Chief Customer Officer at Kion. “The fluidity and
large turnover often lead to thousands of groups to manage for
least privileged access. We are continuing to invest in providing
an easy solution for cloud permissions management, especially for
higher education institutions where cloud access, provisioning and
deprovisioning are critical.”
Kion will be leading an Industry Insights panel at EDUCAUSE
featuring Northwestern’s Matthew Rich and Dan Landerman, Senior
Cloud Engineer, as well as Texas A&M University’s Joseph
Rafferty, Cloud Engineering Manager. The session, “Building a
Culture of Accountability with Automated Cloud Operations,” will
provide insights into how leading universities have implemented
sound financial management, security, and compliance controls by
providing their teams with visibility, guardrails, and
automation.
You can visit Kion at booth #8061 in the Enterprise Strategy,
Infrastructure, and Support Neighborhood. Kion proudly supports
dozens of institutions across higher education and research on
their journey to secure and streamline cloud operations. To learn
more, visit Kion’s Higher Ed industry page.
Kion will begin offering v3.11 in November 2024.
About Kion
Kion automates CloudOps with a single platform providing
policy-based identity, FinOps, and compliance for multicloud
infrastructure. Kion helps organizations achieve ‘governance by
default’ through improved visibility, automation, guardrails, and
guidance across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI environments. This helps
enterprises reduce complexity, eliminate chaos, and minimize manual
work so they can innovate faster with less risk. Wherever they are
on their cloud journey, Kion empowers organizations to confidently
provision accounts, maintain financial control, and ensure
compliance with security regulations. Kion serves leading
commercial, higher education, and government agencies including
Indeed, Verizon, NASA, and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC).
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Sara Jacono 540-764-0043 LaunchTech Communications
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