Blog Automation & Orchestration Continuous Compliance FinOps
Last updated on November 13th, 2024 at 9:37am
As cloud environments continue to evolve with the rise of AI and multicloud strategies, the demand for stronger, unified governance is more important than ever. Kion is at the forefront of this mission, equipping organizations with a single platform to manage, optimize, and secure their cloud operations.
With that in mind, we’re excited to roll out Kion 3.11! This release brings new capabilities in identity and access management, FinOps, and compliance to help you stay in control and tackle the challenges of today’s cloud landscape.
Keep reading to learn how these updates can improve your cloud operations and help you implement a ‘governance by default’ strategy.
FOCUS Ingest
The future of cloud billing data is now available in Kion. Kion supports the FOCUS billing spec and users can now update their billing sources to ingest FOCUS from the four supported cloud service providers. This allows consistency across the providers and enables the use of spend types such as List or Amortized & Attributed cost (also known as Effective Cost) across all providers. Additionally, it allows Kion to begin utilizing data from the FOCUS spec to create enhanced reporting features over time for our customers.
As of 3.11.0, Kion only supports FOCUS configuration for CSP’s billing sources, with plans to extend support to all FOCUS specs, regardless of the source in upcoming releases.
For those unfamiliar with FOCUS, it’s an effort to unify billing data across the industry. You can learn more about the purpose and spec by visiting here.
SCIM Support
Kion is excited to announce support for cross-domain identity management – also known as SCIM – which is an industry standard for automating the exchange of user identity information between identity providers and downstream IT services. By leveraging Kion’s new SCIM support, CloudOps teams are able to provide a more secure experience to users and ensure their identity information in Kion stays up-to-date with the latest changes from downstream identity providers like Microsoft Entra or Okta.
SCIM provides an easier and more secure way to provision, update, and de-provision users on Kion. When users leave an organization, SCIM can shorten the window of time a user has access to Kion by terminating any active sessions and reducing the window of exposure that user may have. This is due to the “push” nature of SCIM, whereby provisioning and deprovisioning instructions are immediately sent when changes are made in the identity provider.
Custom Variables
Custom Variables for compliance enable CloudOps teams to dynamically customize compliance at the project and OU levels, resulting in significant time savings and drastically reducing the number of compliance checks to manage. For example, imagine a scenario where different projects and OUs in Kion have different cost centers, and you want to make sure those resources are set with the correct ‘cost-center’ tag values. Before Custom Variables, this would require duplicating multiple compliance checks and modifying the remediation actions to meet the unique requirements of each project or OU. Now with Custom Variables, you can configure a single compliance check with a custom variable to automatically populate the desired values. Variables can be inherited down through the organization chart, and can be customized at various levels of the hierarchy to meet specific business requirements. This significantly reduces the time and effort for CloudOps teams to manage compliance checks, freeing them up to focus on strategic goals.
Wondering how Custom Variables could automate more of your workflows beyond compliance checks? Sign up to become a Kion Design Partner and share your feedback!
That’s Not All!
These are just the highlights! For details on all of our new features, changes, and bug fixes, read the full release notes in our Support Center (login required for some articles).
If you're new to Kion, welcome! You can schedule a free demo to learn more about our comprehensive cloud operations software. You can also follow us on LinkedIn for more cloud operations news.
