Feature Friday: Organizational Units in Kion

Kion uniquely provides the ability to build an organizational chart— essentially a visual representation of your cloud estate across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud that is mapped and grouped to your liking. Typically, these are mapped to functional areas or groups inside of an organization like Marketing, Operations, Engineering, IT, etc. The building blocks of this chart are Organizational Units (OUs) and Projects. OUs serve as containers for other OUs and projects, while projects hold the cloud accounts themselves. Although the concept of OUs seems simple, when they are properly understood and implemented inside of Kion, they unlock automation and context that doesn't exist anywhere else in your cloud estate.

Context and Insight

OUs allow you to group and divide various projects and cloud accounts across your cloud estate. This unlocks the ability to report on OU-specific metrics including finances, compliance findings, and policy and access. You can easily see how each OU is spending versus their allocated or budgeted spend, see an at-a-glance compliance posture, and understand which policies are applied. Without OUs to organize these projects and accounts, this information would be difficult and time-consuming to procure.

Hierarchy and Inheritance

Another great feature of Kion's organizational chart is the concept of hierarchy and inheritance. OUs are hierarchically arranged in the organizational chart, and as such, some OUs are descendants of other OUs. Where this is the case, policies and cloud rules are inherited by the descendant OUs and projects. This automation allows for visibility into the governance and management of your cloud estate and makes multi-cloud compliance much easier. Instead of having to manually apply policy to cloud accounts or resources, applying Kion's cloud rules at an OU level will automatically apply it to descendant OUs, projects, and accounts. You can also quickly apply cloud rules across your entire organization by applying policy to the top-level OU.

Your Custom View of Your Entire Cloud Estate

OUs serve as one of the key building blocks to a well-organized cloud estate. While many customers arrange their OUs according to organizational or functional groups, OUs can be organized in any way you want to give you exactly the view you want. When you couple this flexibility with the inheritance of cloud rules to power automation and the reporting by OUs, it is easy to see how Kion's org chart delivers the context and automation that you need to accomplish meaningful work.

If you’d like to see a demo of OUs, projects, and Kion's organizational chart, please get in contact with one of our experts.

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