White Paper Financial Management
Last updated on February 3rd, 2023 at 5:28pm
More people are moving to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud than ever before, and for good reason: the cloud can make your operations more agile, cost-efficient, and secure.
But traditional approaches for managing IT don’t scale well in the cloud. It’s only once organizations are knee-deep in unfulfilled account requests and blown budgets that many learn a well-kept secret: the potential gains from the cloud aren’t guaranteed. And while many cloud providers offer some management services, they only provide incomplete, platform-specific fragments that you’ll need to assemble and maintain to get full control of your cloud.
Kion, the only complete cloud enablement solution to control your multi-cloud environment at scale, accelerates your journey to mature cloud operations and, ultimately, your cloud success. Kion helps you automate the end-to-end cloud account lifecycle while managing financials and maintaining compliance as you grow. Our software makes it easier than ever before to have a well-managed cloud, saving you precious time and money so you can finally realize the full potential of the cloud.
Cloud Costs: The Promise and the Reality
A cloud-first operation is often touted as cheaper to run due to reduced infrastructure costs. But this doesn’t account for difficult aspects of cloud IT management, which may result in lost revenue that offsets—or even surpasses—any financial gains.
It’s all too easy for teams to spin up oversized cloud resources or to leave a test instance running longer than it’s needed. What’s more, there are no safety nets built in to keep you from overspending and blowing your cloud budget, and lack of meaningful visibility makes it hard to track current spend or predict future spend. As a result, ineffective cloud control is costing companies a fortune: in 2019, Gartner found that organizations without a plan for cloud cost management may be overspending by 70% or more.
How Kion Improves Your Bottom Line
Kion provides a solution to these problems and more. From the day you move to the cloud to ongoing operations, Kion gives you enterprise-class planning tools, automated budget enforcement actions, and customized savings suggestions. With these tools, you can achieve the cost savings you were promised (and then some) for the maximum ROI from the cloud.
Here are just a few ways you can use Kion to achieve cost savings in the cloud:
Save time—and time is money—by automating account management and compliance
The cloud may offer the flexibility of on-demand IT resources, but you don’t get quick, simple access to pre-configured accounts out of the box. You’ll want to provision new accounts quickly to stay agile, but you also need account permissions to be set consistently to ensure security and compliance. That’s where Kion’s automation and orchestration can help. You’ll set rules just once on a top-level component (usually a department or team), and they’ll be enforced hierarchically through that component’s downline. That means you’ll spend a fraction of the time on rule-setting and account provisioning. We make things easier now, but we also provide an IT management schema that scales with your organization as you grow—without requiring more costly man-hours.
Prioritize effectively to get the most out of every dollar spent
They say that prior planning prevents poor performance. That’s why Kion gives you the ultimate planning tools, letting you budget using super-customized funding “buckets” that align with your actual spending and funding requirements. We let you forecast spending based on your spend plan, so you’ll know what’s coming in future months. You’ll get a near-real-time view of your spend across all of your cloud providers, so you’ll know the data isn’t 12-24 hours old (like some cloud providers’ tools). And of course, you’ll have total visibility with our intuitive dashboards and reports, so you can track and view spending in more ways than you can imagine. You’ll have everything you need to plan effectively, spot trends, and change spending patterns wherever it’s needed for enterprise-class budgeting.
Set enforcements so you never overspend again
We let you set your spend ceiling and enforce it proactively and automatically, so you can get an alert if you’re overspending or stop spending outright when you’ve reached a set threshold. You’ll get true peace of mind knowing you’ve eliminated unplanned spending, and you’ll never have to worry about a surprise cloud bill—or explaining out-of-control cloud spend to your stakeholders—ever again.
Eliminate cloud waste to cut costs by 30%
Kion also suggests savings opportunities to identify cloud resources that are over-provisioned or underutilized. No one likes wasting money, and we give you an easy way to cut costs dramatically; our clients have saved an average of 30% on cloud costs using our savings opportunities. So you’ll save big without spending lots of time evaluating resource use or making big sacrifices such as losing staff or cutting vital services.
Get Started Now
Ready to make the most of the cloud? You can try our solution free for 30 days. Our onboarding is fast and simple, and our current customers rave about how easy it was to get started with cloud control. We know you’ll love it too.
More ways to make the most of the cloud
Automation & Orchestration
- Centralized management of all cloud accounts and resources aligned to your organization’s hierarchy
- Federated single sign-on and MFA for secure access to the cloud console
- Automated, self-service account creation with native console, CLI, and API access
Continuous Compliance
- Robust inheritable access policies to restrict use of non-compliant cloud services
- Enforcement of security policies across the organization
- Real-time findings to report the compliance gap and automatic or on-demand remediation to make corporate audits easier
