What is CloudOps?
Cloud Operations (CloudOps) is the practice of managing the performance, delivery, and optimization of IT services and workloads running in a cloud environment.
- Resource Provisioning
- Security and Identity
- Workload Management
- Cloud Scalability
- Cloud Financial Management
- Cloud Governance
- Cloud Compliance & Auditing
- Monitoring and Observability
Common CloudOps Challenges
The reality of CloudOps can be complex and chaotic. The lack of visibility, control, and automation in managing cloud resources hinders organizations from fully leveraging the benefits of the cloud. Most organizations are experiencing one or more of the following challenges:
Cloud spend is out of control
Inability to visualize spend and enforce budgets
Overprivileged cloud access
Access provisioning is either manual or IdPs give everyone the same privileges
Account sprawl without baselines
Manually provisioned accounts lack guardrails and are tracked in spreadsheets
Existing tools generate more work
Detection tools are noisy, lack context and require manual remediation
Everyone wants access to GenAI
Provisioning sandbox accounts is risky without access policies & spend controls
There's a better way
To rapidly scale cloud adoption, the future of CloudOps must be governed by default to reduce complexity, eliminate chaos, and minimize manual work.
Maturing CloudOps Processes & Teams
Evolving Your CloudOps Practice
Multicloud governance at scale is difficult. In addition to understanding key CloudOps challenges, it’s important for organizations to identify where they are on their cloud journey ie “cloud maturity” to understand what is needed to evolve.
Many organizations begin their cloud journey in a "crawl" phase, where challenges like limited expertise, inconsistent practices, and manual processes slow progress.
With Kion, teams can startup in the cloud and grow into “Walk” and then “Run”-- building maturity and confidence in their cloud operations each step of the way.
Crawl
The Starting Point of Cloud Maturity, Lacking Visibility
When organizations are early in their cloud journey or have rapidly lifted and shifted to the cloud, they often come to Kion to address challenges such as:
- Cloud Provisioning & Orchestration: Account provisioning is manual, ad-hoc, and slow.
- Identity & Access Management (IAM): Access to cloud is restricted, limiting innovation. Multiple ad-hoc identity sources.
- Security & Compliance: Lack of visibility into security posture across team. No accountability or consistency.
- Cost Management (FinOps): Spend tracked manually with ad hoc tools or spreadsheets.
Walk
Gaining Control, Building Guardrails, and Scaling Governance
More mature organizations may have begun to automate and standardize some of their cloud operations. Kion works with these organizations to improve collaboration and rapidly scale governance across the organization:
- Cloud Provisioning & Orchestration: Account provisioning and onboarding is partially automated, but lacks baseline policies and controls.
- Identity & Access Management (IAM): Access provisioning and reviews are manual.
- Security & Compliance: Security posture is measured, but remediation is inconsistent or reactive.
- Cost Management (FinOps): Centralized reporting, alerts, and some commitments / right-sizing.
Run
Fully Automated Cloud Operations with Governance by Default
With Kion fully implemented, organizations reach a mature "run" phase, where cloud operations become fully automated, visible, and manageable across your multicloud estate:
- Cloud Provisioning & Orchestration: Account provisioning is automated, fast, and follows well-architected best practices. Governance is a shared responsibility.
- Identity & Access Management (IAM): Automated access provisioning follows principle of least privilege (POLP) by default. Access reviews are automated.
- Security & Compliance: Teams are accountable for security posture and proactive controls automatically fix misconfigurations.
- Cost Management (FinOps): Project teams are accountable for spend. Guardrails enforce budgets, costs are allocated, and savings opportunities are implemented continuously.
With Kion’s visibility, automation, guardrails, and guidance, organizations transform from managing cloud complexity manually to running fully automated and secure cloud operations.
