CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company delivering daily technology and channel news, has named Kion to its annual Cloud 100 list honoring leading cloud companies for 2025 across five key categories: infrastructure, monitoring and management, storage, software and security. Kion was recognized as one of the top Cloud Monitoring and Management companies, saying “More AI and multi-cloud demand means more unified governance demand. And Kion has elevated its products to capitalize on the trend.”
"As customer cloud needs accelerate, particularly in the face of expanding needs for digital transformation and AI-based solutions, cloud innovation has become more important than ever,” said Jennifer Follett, VP, U.S. Content, and Executive Editor, CRN, at The Channel Company. “Each company on this year’s Cloud 100 list are breaking new ground delivering products and services that empower solution providers to expand their cloud offerings and meet their customers’ requirements. We look forward to seeing how these companies continue to advance cloud computing in the coming year.”
The State of Cloud Computing in 2025
We've seen a significant push for modernized cloud operations (CloudOps) as enterprise demands evolve, placing increased pressure and burden on already overwhelmed cloud infrastructure and engineering teams. These teams are now tasked with a multitude of new responsibilities, such as provisioning cloud resources for AI projects, controlling costs across multicloud and implementing more automation. 2025 will be marked by transformative efforts to converge FinOps efforts with cloud operations priorities into a holistic process. And CloudOps platforms need to rise to the occasion to meet these needs – that's where Kion comes into play.
Since our inception, we’ve served as an automated, policy-based CloudOps platform for managing identity, compliance, and financial management across multicloud environments. However, over the past year, we invested in strengthening our FinOps and IAM capabilities; two prominent areas that practitioners are focusing on to mitigate heightened security risks and optimize spending in the midst of a tumultuous economic environment. We are well positioned to help CloudOps teams navigate this next generation of the cloud.
Why Kion Stands Out
When it comes to cloud management, we see organizations utilizing approaches that encourage reactive optimization. This is a significant misstep because it means that resources were wasted in the process. The Kion platform is centered around proactive governance to preemptively avoid waste, better manage cloud spend, and govern AI innovation. At Kion, this is referred to as a ‘governance by default’ approach, which is facilitated through enhanced automation capabilities. With Kion, organizations achieve:
Visibility into financials and security across your organization
Guardrails to control and define what accounts or roles can or can’t do
Strengthened security to reduce the risk of overprivileged access
Automated enforcement of guardrails, stopping the busy work
Cost management strategies that prevent cost overruns before they happen
“The leading cloud service providers and our partner community have recognized the power of proactive cloud governance. Kion is proud to partner with these organizations to enforce budgets, prevent waste, and drive new levels of cloud efficiency,” said John Lynch, COO at Kion. “We’re honored to be named to the CRN Cloud 100 list and look forward to continued collaboration with the partner community to support our customers in their cloud and AI initiatives."
What Comes Next
Kion will be continuing to invest in its FinOps capabilities, as we recognize that the future of the cloud is closely tied to the unification of FinOps responsibilities. Our objective is to ensure that we have a robust set of capabilities across each phase of the FinOps Framework – Inform, Optimize and Operate – available within our platform.
We will also be expanding our cloud governance capabilities for artificial intelligence (AI) use cases. Stay tuned for all of the latest product updates.
