White Paper Automation & Orchestration Continuous Compliance
Last updated on March 6th, 2023 at 2:41pm
In many organizations today, it’s typically easier to request and receive a new laptop than it is to start developing in the cloud. At home, you can get a cloud account in minutes, but it often takes organizations days or weeks to provision access due to manual processing and budget and compliance concerns. Cloud operations and business operations remain largely disconnected. The integration of Kion and ServiceNowTM removes this disconnect — giving you an expedited path to secure cloud operations.
Unlock the full self-service potential of the cloud
ServiceNow is where your employees go to request new IT products and services. Why have them use a different solution or process to procure cloud accounts? Using ServiceNow’s ITOM orchestration and ITSM approval capabilities, employees can visit the service portal, request cloud account(s) and, upon approval, get an account seamlessly provisioned by Kion. This account will be in accordance with your compliance policies, aligned to your internal cost centers or budgets, and configured for easy secure sign on with your enterprise authentication. Your users get the benefit of streamlined native access to AWS Accounts, Azure Subscriptions, and/or Google Cloud Projects. User experience improves, and IT operates at peak efficiency.
Go beyond the pre-defined catalog
A key business driver of cloud migration is speed to innovation. Organizations effectively put handcuffs on innovation when you broker access to the cloud by giving users a rigid, pre-defined catalog of limited cloud services. By integrating ServiceNow with Kion, once the manager approves the setup of a new cloud account, users go beyond basic compute, networking, and storage services but stop short of ‘wild west’ access to the cloud. Kion provisions the account in accordance with the permitted services and resources you’ve defined. Say goodbye to arbitrary limitations and hello to innovation.
Ensure compliance from Day 1 until sunset
Your IT team must manage standard and atypical requests for cloud access, from new employee onboarding to one-off projects. But your responsibility over cloud operations obviously goes beyond initial account fulfillment. With Kion, cloud accounts are protected from misconfiguration. Cloud Rules are automatically applied to the account based on lifecycle environment, the account’s home in the org chart, and the sensitivity of the systems being deployed. This gives you compliance from Day 1 until the project is sunset.
From a financial perspective, Kion spend plans and near-real-time spend tracking ensure that cloud accounts remain both within budget and aligned to your internal cost centers, making it easy for your finance teams to control and track your spend across clouds. Budget enforcement automatically happens based on rules you define to slow or stop spending, giving IT leadership and Finance confidence in secure and cost-controlled cloud operations.
Success Snapshot
A leading National Laboratory integrated the power of Kion account, budget, and compliance governance with the ServiceNow request and orchestration capabilities to accelerate their cloud adoption.
What used to be a multi-week process to request and procure a cloud account is now complete in a few days. The laboratory retired manual processes and paperwork in favor of fulfilling cloud account requests via ServiceNow. The requestor simply initiates the request in ServiceNow for business owner and IT approval. After approval, Kion creates and allocates funding, sets a spend plan, and ensures the proper compliance boundaries are set for the cloud account. Finally, the Kion API connects with Active Directory to create user accounts and deliver credentials to the requestor. All in a matter of minutes.
Kion Features
