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Cloud Cost Management Vendor Profile: Kion

Organizations juggling services from the major public cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform — often struggle to streamline the disparate data that emerge. For businesses and government agencies with a deliberate focus on financial management, Kion can prove a management option to consider.

In Amalgam Insights’ latest profile featuring cloud cost management and optimization vendors, we discuss what Kion does and how the company differs from its competition.

WHY KION FOR CLOUD COST AND OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT

  • Single-platform approach for identity and access management, financial control, and security configuration across the top three public cloud platforms
  • Deep emphasis on compliance checks, including United States federal government compliance
  • Insight into financial management beyond spend savings to include budgeting, forecasting, and compliance

ABOUT KION

Kion is an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. Formerly known as cloudtamer.io, Kion was founded in 2018. While it is headquartered in Fulton, Maryland, Kion takes a remote-first approach to employment, so it has staff across the United States — more than 50 people as of May 2022. Kion reports annual revenue of between $5 million and $10 million and holds a Net Promoter Score of 81. The company serves about 45 clients collectively spending more than $500 million across IaaS and PaaS.

Most of Kion’s customers fall into three segments: government, higher education, and commercial enterprise. For the government and higher education markets, Kion helps agencies manage funding allocations, align spend with appropriations, meet standards, and ensure compliance (e.g. FedRAMP, NIST SP 800-171, CMMC). Enterprises tend to look to Kion for help in improving the engineer experience to accelerate cloud adoption.

KION’S OFFERING

Kion calls its approach to cloud governance and management “cloud enablement.” This term is intended to describe a combination of automation and orchestration, financial management, and ongoing compliance checks to gain visibility into and control over multiple clouds. 

Kion installs in the customer’s cloud account rather than as a software-as-a-service solution. Kion supports management across cloud providers and lets users integrate with identity access management tools including Okta, native Active Directory, and OneLogin; with IT service management platforms including ServiceNow, Jira, and Splunk; and with host-level vulnerability management technologies including Tenable.

Kion’s platform provides capabilities for automation and orchestration, financial management (FinOps), and continuous compliance, including self-service provisioning for use governance. For financial management, Kion users can allocate funds, receive alerts on potential budget overruns, and proactively remediate cost issues. Kion’s compliance measures contain auto-remediation for governance policy issues, as well. Kion assesses factors such as budget and funding sources to show what remains in a budget, and where that money came from to align cost management, budgeting, and forecasting. Kion’s compliance capabilities enforce policies across clouds at project and resource levels. Kion supports more than 4,500 compliance checks and provides a security control matrix that displays how cloud layers are meeting requirements.

Admins can enforce budget actions that prevent overspending in DevOps and sandbox environments. Kion pulls in data from multiple sources to auto-populate fields.

Standard support for Kion includes email with a two-business-day response time, and access to the Kion Support Center. Customers may procure annual premium support to have a dedicated technical account manager.

Kion’s pricing depends on cloud spend under management. The company sells directly through its in-house sales teams, third-party partners, and on cloud marketplaces. Kion also provides a back-end platform which can be white-labeled to support managed service providers, resellers, and system integrators.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

Kion wins customers based on several operational challenges. First, it attracts users who struggle to move into the cloud quickly. Second, Kion appeals to organizations struggling with cloud spend excesses, wasted resources, and security concerns. Third, Kion lands users lacking preventive controls. Finally, the company gets new business from companies seeking to remove complexity as they provision new cloud accounts and projects.

Kion competes most often against internal processes or homegrown tools. It also competes against Spot by NetApp and CloudHealth by VMware in the financial reporting realm. On the security end, Kion faces Fugue and Turbot in competitive deals. Some organizations view Kion as a platform that integrates those products (and others), or as a tool that will eventually replace those other brands. Rather than bifurcate personas into specific operational responsibilities — say, by FinOps, SecOps, and DevOps — Kion aligns with business personas and role-based governance across the platform based on functional need and to control spend.

Kion states that customers see savings of at least 30 percent through savings opportunities and cost optimizations. With automation, Kion claims soft-dollar savings can exceed 60 percent if organizations are willing to also review staffing, process, and policy decisions. Kion’s reference customers include NASA, Indeed, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and Encamp.

KION’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

Kion plans to build more contextual insight to display cloud environment behaviors that are interrelated so users can make more informed decisions. Kion also intends to add more compliance policies as well as cloud platforms beyond the Big Three of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS’ RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that organizations — particularly in government, higher education, and commercial enterprise — trying to manage one or more of the top three public cloud providers consider Kion. Kion focuses on ease-of-use and cross-departmental visibility to avoid overspending and ensure security and compliance. That streamlined approach provides a single view for cloud cost and optimization management, budgeting, and technology implementation. Amalgam Insights recommends Kion for companies that seek to cut cloud costs and consider financial management to be part of a greater effort of improving operational performance associated with cloud services.

Need More Guidance Now?

Check out Amalgam Insights’ new Vendor SmartList report, Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession, available for purchase. If you want to discuss your Cloud Cost Management challenges, please feel free to schedule time with us.