Cloud Enablement for the Higher Ed Community

Last updated on March 16th, 2023 at 8:18pm

Kion is a participant in the Internet2 Cloud Scorecard program, which helps research and education institutions quickly assess which new cloud services meet common requirements to operate in complex technology, security, compliance, and legal environments. We recently had the opportunity to virtually present to the Internet2 community and address many attendee questions. You can find the replay - and a sample of the Q&A - below. A big thank you to Internet2 for giving us the opportunity to share how cloud enablement can drive higher ed success.

Cloud Governance and Management in the Higher Ed Community

The higher education community has unique challenges in the cloud:

• Allocating both centralized and decentralized funding, and enforcing static spend thresholds aligned to grants and projects
• Ensuring flexible mechanisms are in place to easily add and remove users to respond to frequent turnover
• Managing data retention and classification risk, as well as delegating access control to information

These needs are typically addressed by the rules and policies of cloud governance and the automation and ongoing management of cloud operations. The Kion sweet spot is how we address these challenges in a single cloud enablement platform for security, repeatability, and budget alignment.

How Kion Helps Higher Ed Achieve Cloud Success

Kion's three pillars of automation and orchestration, financial management, and continuous compliance help higher ed confidently and securely scale in the cloud. Here's a quick guide to the highlights in our replay below:

3:05 - Introduction to the Kion solution
8:25 - How Kion helps address unique higher ed needs
12:00 - Kion demonstration

Answering Questions From the Higher Ed Community

Our webinar audience had many great questions. Here's just a few, along with our team's input.

How is Kion deployed?

Kion is a self-hosted application, not a SaaS solution. The Kion application is deployed and installed directly within your AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud environment, ensuring your data remains 100% private.

Can the management of Kion itself be controlled programmatically or is this done only through the web portal?

Yes! Check out our public API guide for more information.

Can I get a free trial of Kion?

Absolutely! Kion offers a well-documented, free guided evaluation program that typically provides 30 days for organizations to see the Kion platform - and results - in action.

Can the compliance dashboard be based on different security frameworks?

Yes, we have many compliance/security frameworks that come out-of-the-box with Kion. Plus, you can add in your own additional frameworks as well. Dashboards within Kion are customizable and can be tailored as customers and end users need.

Once a budget has been reached, will Kion prevent any new self-service provisioning or add a layer of approval/override?

Kion’s financial enforcements send alerts or cut off spending when you hit set thresholds. Other tools simply alert or report on cloud financials, whereas Kion actually takes action to keep blown budgets from happening in the first place.

I am aware of one case study in which a test software run was expected to generate no more than $7.00 in charges, but a runaway malformed recursive serverless function took off explosively. Even though the user was actively monitoring cost alerts, the runaway function had run up $72,000 in charges before the user could get it shut down. Could Kion have prevented this?

Yes, you can set enforcement actions on individual services when specified thresholds are reached or when burn rates go above a certain threshold. Kion is designed to be both proactive and reactive based on your use case and needs.

Can cloud rule management (create, assign, delete) be delegated? For example, can our security office create and assign some logging rules, our network group manage network gateway rules, etc?

Yes, you can create granular permissions inside Kion to determine who can create rules and who can apply them.

Learn More About Kion in Higher Ed

We currently have several higher education institutions as Kion customers. In fact, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University shared their experience using Kion at our Cloudunity community event.

To learn more about Kion - including how to get started on our free 30-day guided evaluation - request a personalized demo today!