New in Release 3.8: Multi-Cloud Financial, Compliance, and Provisioning Enhancements

Last updated on November 27th, 2023 at 9:37am

Cloud operations require working across every aspect of the cloud, from purchasing commitments, to locking-down IAM policies, and everything in-between. Kion has always supported a holistic approach to CloudOps that includes automation, compliance, financials, and identity, and we’re stoked that Kion 3.8 makes improvements in all these areas.

Let’s walk through the major features in 3.8, including big changes to the way you can view and manage cloud spend in Kion, as well as improvements to compliance management, Azure subscription creation, spend reports, resource inventory, and more!

Flexible Spend Types

With no consistent way to manage spend across multi-cloud environments and large variances from upfront fees for commitment-based discounts, spend management is messy at best, and impractical at worst. With 3.8, Kion administrators can define the spend type to be used across Kion for reporting spend, setting budgets, tracking funding source allocation, and triggering enforcements. Spend type allows organizations to organize enterprise-wide spend using the configuration that works best for them.

• Billed shows what you are charged by the cloud service provider (what you’d see on your statement). This is what we’ve traditionally shown in Kion.
• List shows the list price for a given service. This is helpful for teams with complicated spending arrangements that want to align on a consistent baseline.
• Amortized - Not Attributed shows upfront spend across the term of the commitment on the account where the upfront purchase was made. This is ideal for showback and MSP use cases.
• Amortized - Attributed shows the amortized spend on the account where it was consumed. This is ideal for chargeback use cases and promoting team accountability.

Depending on your spend type selection, you have the option to deduct or include discounts, refunds, or credits from financial reporting across Kion. These same options are reflected in Spend Reports.

For more information on configuring spend types in 3.8, see Financial Settings.

Compliance User Experience Improvements

On the compliance findings page, Kion has cleaned up the interface, making it easier than ever to get and stay compliant.

The Org Chart view of compliance findings is now easier to interpret, with scores rolling-up across projects and OUs. We’ve also improved the performance of compliance scans, speeding up results for always up-to-date data.

Azure EA and MCA Subscription Creation

Now you can provision any and all Azure subscriptions in Kion. EA and CSP subscriptions can be provisioned with a couple clicks, and EA, MCA, and CSP subscriptions can all be created and managed via the Kion public API.

For more information on provisioning Azure subscriptions in 3.8, see Enabling Azure Account Creation.

Spend Report Relative Timeframes and Shareable URLs

Kion now supports relative timeframes for Spend Reports, allowing you to select common timeframes like “last quarter” without specifying start and end dates. We’ve also added sharable URL paths for Spend Reports, so you can bookmark or share specific reports (with all your filters and configurations in place) and easily find your recurring reports.

Resource Inventory Export

Kion’s resource inventory collects tons of great information, and now you can export that data to CSV to manipulate and share in your BI tool of choice.

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 on 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 enablement software. You can also follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for more cloud enablement news.