Last updated on July 22nd, 2024 at 11:28am
June was a busy month for Kion! We sponsored and participated in three major conferences in consecutive weeks, with each providing unique opportunities for engagement, learning, and showcasing our recent innovations.
Below is a quick recap of our highlights and takeaways from each:
AWS re:Inforce
The conference carousel kicked off in Philadelphia for AWS re:Inforce, a security focused conference where organizations learn how to enhance their skills and confidence in cloud security, compliance, identity, and privacy. Kion was a booth sponsor, and we were fortunate to engage with hundreds of people who stopped by to learn how we can help operationalize solutions to their security concerns.
Key Highlight:
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Kion utilized this time to announce and demo our new feature, Admin Audit, a new identity and access management (IAM) capability that discovers, manages, and remediates overprivileged administrators across an organization’s cloud infrastructure. In simple terms, this new feature helps organizations find their admins efficiently and effectively.
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Kion was fortunate enough to engage with some new prospects in financial services and technology that had immediate needs for cloud operations capabilities. We’re excited to add some new customers to the Kion platform and turn them into fans.
FinOps X
The following week took Kion to beautiful San Diego for the 3rd annual FinOps X conference. This conference is consistently a highlight of my year, as it’s full of learning and great connections from start to finish. For Kion, we spent the week focused on connecting with current and prospective customers, while also engaging in sessions and chalk talks to make sure we are aligned on the future of the FinOps industry.
Aside from great customer conversations, there were a few key takeaways that will definitely shape the next year in FinOps.
- The first is the general availability of the FOCUS 1.0 spec. Since last year’s conference, FinOps practitioners and vendors have been eagerly waiting for a GA’ed version of FOCUS. To coincide with the release, all four major CSPs also announced support of the spec. With this announcement, we will see two things ramp up: 1) practitioners will begin to reimagine what’s possible with both their cloud reporting capabilities, as well as the possibilities for viewing all related infrastructure and 3rd party tool cost reporting in a single view 2) vendors will begin to announce FOCUS related features and enhancements to better support the practitioners adopting the spec for their organization. Kion has already announced initial FOCUS ingest support for release in Q3.
- Although FOCUS was the headliner for the week, there were additional topics that were hot discussion areas such as AI and GreenOps. However, my biggest takeaway was my excitement for Kion’s positioning in this market. It was evident that Kion’s holistic positioning focused on Cloud Operations for identify, compliance, and financials is solving a need in the market:
- There was a ton of discussion on “FinOps for AI” and the importance of figuring out how to manage and govern AI spend as your organization innovates and transforms via new technology. Kion is positioned to solve these concerns through our governance positioning, allowing appropriate guardrails to be in place to enable innovation within appropriate limits.
- Speaking of governance, there were several great sessions on the importance of governance. My personal favorite was “How to Combine Management & Governance with Cost Optimization”, a session that did a great job of showing how governance and policies lead to impactful cost savings — these are two areas Kion can automate across a multicloud footprint.
- Additionally, there were more references to security than in years past, including an opening keynote reference to “security being job zero and FinOps being job 0.5”. Kion has always believed that identity and compliance are interconnected with FinOps and maximizing the value of cloud. It was great to hear more practitioners connect these efforts in the same sentence instead of mentioning them separately.
AWS DC Summit
To round out the month, Kion was back on the expo floor as a sponsor for AWS DC Summit. This conference focuses on customers operating in the public sector. Given Kion’s early roots starting out in the public sector space, it’s great to have so many current customers and partners in attendance, along with an opportunity to meet in person with several prospective customers.
Key Highlights:
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I was fortunate to have the opportunity to give a Lighting Talk on “The Future of FinOps is CloudOps”, which was a verbal and visual expansion on the blog and white-paper Kion recently published. In this talk, I shared Kion’s vision of the future of FinOps, which we summarize as Governance by Default, a type of governance posture an organization’s CloudOps team is uniquely positioned to execute.
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Public Sector organizations are maturing their CloudOps and FinOps practices quickly. Numerous practitioners spoke about their plans to adopt FOCUS across their SaaS tooling or on-prem, plans to use AI, and had well-thought out approaches for how they want to mature their CloudOps practices over the next 6 months.
Next Steps for Kion
Our product is driven by the needs of end users, and these conferences serve as a great way of understanding and learning those needs. I look forward to continuing the conversations we had with so many people over the last month, and continuing to innovate our capabilities to build out a best-in-class automated CloudOps platform for multicloud infrastructure.
If interested in learning more about Kion or if you have any feedback for me, please reach out to [email protected] to continue the discussion.
