Last updated on July 24th, 2024 at 10:09am
We are pleased to announce that Kion has been named in The Forrester Wave: Cloud Cost Management and Optimization Solutions (CCMO), Q3 2024. This report covers the most significant vendors that “matter most” in the CCMO market and marks Kion’s debut appearance in this popular analyst report, which is a testament to our market presence and success helping customers use guardrails to speed development, prevent cost overruns, and realize savings opportunities faster.
Highlights from the Forrester Wave Report
The report cites industry trends driving the growth of the CCMO market, including:
- public cloud being a necessary part of an enterprise infrastructure strategy
- slowing economic growth prompting cost-cutting measures and demanding justification for any spend
- contraction of the hybrid cloud management world, shifting focus from heavy, complex hybrid cloud management solutions to simpler, less expensive CCMO solutions
According to the report, Kion has a compelling presence in highly regulated industries and is one of the only self-hosted CCMO solutions, which helps customers meet stringent security and compliance requirements for FedRAMP, SOC2, and NIST-based standards.
Forrester also rated Kion well for the following capabilities:
- Access and Permissions Management: Robust tools for managing user access and permissions
- Billing Administration: Efficient and user-friendly billing processes
- Cloud Platform Support: Comprehensive support for multiple cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and now OCI
- Usage Policies and Resource Discovery: Detailed policies for cloud usage and effective resource discovery
- Remediation: Prevent, detect, report and remediate issues
- Admin Portal Usability and Experience: An intuitive and efficient admin portal
- Integration and APIs: Seamless integration with existing systems and powerful APIs
- Pricing Flexibility and Transparency: Clear and adaptable pricing structures
It’s important to note that the report is exclusively focused on traditional CCMO capabilities – more recently referred to as FinOps – and represents a point-in-time rating on Kion v3.9. Kion’s customers across commercial, public sector, and higher education tell us they choose Kion for its comprehensive set of automated CloudOps capabilities spanning cloud provisioning, IAM, and compliance, as well as FinOps. In fact, Kion is a single platform that pairs FinOps with broader CloudOps capabilities to achieve multicloud governance by default through policy-based controls and guardrails.
The Future of FinOps is CloudOps
At Kion, we believe the future of Cloud Operations includes an increase in responsibilities related to FinOps. This is because CloudOps teams, both historically and going forward, are asked to focus on governing the cloud. Traditionally, that tends to look like provisioning accounts or monitoring for compliance concerns. However, with the rise of AI, multicloud expansion, and the general increase in cloud footprints, the future of FinOps is going to require more governance related efforts to help organizations maintain control of their spend. This is why Kion’s vision is focused on solving governance holistically within a single platform.
Governance isn’t just maintaining security risk tolerance or meeting compliance obligations, it’s also taking control of your spend in a programmatic way while enabling your organization to maximize the value of the cloud. The modern version of cloud governance includes proper policy-based controls and guardrails that span security, compliance, and cost.
“ A set of rules, policies, and processes (implementation, enablement, and maintenance) that guides an organization’s cloud operations without breaching the parameters of risk tolerance or compliance obligations. ”
– Forrester's definition of cloud governance
Kion’s CloudOps capabilities extend beyond traditional CCMO solutions by offering a unified approach to cloud operations. Our platform ensures organizations can automate and streamline their cloud operations, providing visibility into security and financials across all cloud resources. We help customers define and enforce policies, manage identity and access permissions, and prevent cost overruns before they happen.
“ As cloud costs increase, the need for financial insight in cloud operations is growing, and as such, we’ll see more organizations understand the role FinOps plays in the future of their business. We firmly believe the fundamental direction of the market is multicloud and the future of Cloud Operations includes an increase in responsibilities related to FinOps. Our vision is to help CloudOps teams with their mission in solving cloud governance more holistically with a single platform that provides policy-based controls and guardrails spanning security, compliance, and cost. ”
– Tatum Tummins, FinOps Product Manager, Kion
Our Commitment to FinOps Innovation
The cloud cost management and optimization market is quickly evolving, and Kion’s strengths lie in our adaptability and responsiveness to market demands, particularly for customers in industries that are highly regulated and require security and compliance.
Kion’s core values start with turning customers into fans. This includes a customer-focused culture that has built a track record of successfully supporting Fortune 500 organizations such as Indeed, Verizon, EPAM, and Leidos, public sector clients in the federal government and national defense agencies, including NASA, CDC, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as well as leading higher education institutions such as Penn St, Texas A&M, and Northwestern University.
We recognize the importance of continuous improvement and innovation and aim to further enhance our platform across FinOps and CloudOps, based on customer feedback, to meet the evolving needs of the market.
We are excited about the future and look forward to continuing to innovate and support our customers in achieving their business and cloud goals.
For more information and to explore our offerings, request a demo.
