Company showcases latest platform capabilities and highlights best practices to support cloud initiatives in higher education and research institutions
Kion, the leading automated CloudOps platform for multicloud, 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.
“Building a Culture of Accountability with Automated 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.”
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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.
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