Axonius Asset Cloud
Centralized asset insights have improved dashboard reporting and support daily security tasks
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Axonius is as a sysadmin. I use Axonius to ingest data from security tools, provide access to users, create dashboards, and provide reports.
What is most valuable?
Axonius offers excellent features including ease of use, the ability to ingest all assets at one central display, creating multiple visualization dashboards, the ability to create an enforcement center to complete tasks and support the program, and support for government operations.
I find myself using dashboard creation and creating new enforcement actions the most, as they have helped me in my day-to-day work.
Axonius has positively impacted my organization by making it easier to create visualized dashboards, enabling the creation of easy-to-visualize asset counts, asset summaries, CVE reports, and CVE vulnerability data reports.
What needs improvement?
Axonius needs to improve by having the ability to ingest IoT data, as customers are requesting IoT data which we are currently unable to provide.
Axonius has several capabilities that could be improved to earn a perfect rating, such as the ability to ingest IoT assets.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Axonius for three years.
What other advice do I have?
I have not had the ability to use Axonius's AI governance and security feature yet, but I am looking forward to using it. I have not used Axonius's AI accuracy and reliability of output feature yet.
I advise others looking into using Axonius to understand how the tools and data are ingested. Understanding how the data is gathered and how it's correlated gives the end user the ability to understand why Axonius is a great tool. I rate Axonius an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Asset discovery has transformed how we find unprotected devices and deploy endpoint defenses
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Axonius is asset management and asset discovery.
For asset management and discovery, we scan our network through our entire environment and network level, and then we pick up all the devices that don't have an EDR tool or that are not protected by our EDR tools.
We run those scans weekly, and then we will find the device, and if it's applicable for deployment of the EDR tool, we will deploy them.
What is most valuable?
The best features Axonius offers, in my opinion, are asset discovery, finding rogue devices, and vulnerability management.
When I mention device discovery and management, the speed of discovery, the level of detail, and network-level discovery stand out to me.
Axonius has positively impacted my organization significantly, as we discover thousands upon thousands of devices that don't have EDR tools, which means they are not protected. With Axonius, we were able to find them and deploy the EDR tool that they needed.
I can share that we found about the Linux servers and Windows servers, hundreds of them, that were deployed. They were re-imaged and didn't have an EDR tool, and the integration with other tools proved that these devices are live on our network, and they just don't have a specific tool that we need to deploy to them.
What needs improvement?
I think Axonius can be improved with more integration with different third-party tools, so we can identify which tools are missing and what more we can do with these endpoint devices floating around on our network.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Axonius for six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Axonius is stable in my experience.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Axonius's scalability is very impressive.
How are customer service and support?
I don't have too much experience with customer support, but we have the corporate support team for us, so it's much better than customer service.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We didn't have an asset discovery tool before Axonius.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment with Axonius. As part of the EDR deployment, we have saved tons of time pinning down these devices, where they are, and how we can deploy to them.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Axonius, I evaluated other options like Minesweeper.
What other advice do I have?
I very much recommend Axonius and I tell everybody that they should use Axonius because it's one of the best discovery tools and asset discovery tools. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Powerful Network Asset Visibility You Can Trust
Centralized visibility has streamlined security workflows and consistently saved time and costs
What is our primary use case?
My use case for Axonius is extensive as I utilize it in multiple processes, and I would describe the use case for Axonius as great.
What is most valuable?
I find that the features I have found most valuable include its comprehensive functionality.
I am using Axonius's centralized dashboard for visualization of security coverage, and I find it quite useful.
I find that the integration capabilities of Axonius with IT and security solutions are good.
In my opinion, the main benefits Axonius provides for me as a point user include saving time, saving money, and streamlining processes.
What needs improvement?
I am generally satisfied with Axonius's reporting features.
The reporting part could be simplified for the end user, and it might be beneficial to have tutorials or drafts from the vendor.
I want to mention points for improvement, particularly about the reporting part, and I wonder if there are any functions I feel are lacking.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Axonius for four years, and my overall experience with the product has been excellent.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
When it comes to stability of the product, I would rate it a solid 9 out of 10.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In terms of scalability, I would say that Axonius handles it well, and I am satisfied with how it scales.
How are customer service and support?
As for technical support for Axonius, I would rate it an 8 out of 10, with 10 being the best.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In comparing Axonius to other products, I believe its main competitors on the market offer similar functionalities, but my experience with other solutions has shown me that Axonius stands out.
How was the initial setup?
Regarding the initial setup for Axonius, my experience tells me that it is simple.
What about the implementation team?
We purchased a very top-end package of Axonius directly from the company.
What was our ROI?
Overall, I would give Axonius a ten as my final mark for the product.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
For pricing, I would rate it as a 7, where one represents a high price and ten represents a low price.
What other advice do I have?
Regarding Axonius's automated enforcement actions, I find them useful, and I am actively using them in that area.
I do use Axonius in maintaining compliance with regulatory frameworks like GDPR or HIPAA, and I think that is a good approach.
I would give this review a rating of 10 out of 10.
Powerful Visibility and Queries, but a Learning Curve and Heavy UI at Scale
Centralized asset tracking has transformed governance and now speeds incident response
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Axonius is config management and asset inventory. I use Axonius to maintain the asset inventory up to date and also to identify the owners quickly; these are the primary requirements, and it will help us build governance across all the assets that we have provisioned in different AWS accounts and the on-premises environment.
Our team especially leverages Axonius for asset tracking and ownership. In terms of security incidents, it was really challenging for us to identify who created the asset, who the owner is, and how we can track what changes happened over the period; those are the big challenges in the past. Now with this solution in place, we can quickly track what the asset is, who is the owner, what changes have happened, and what caused a real incident or changes that really impacted the system, which can be easily tracked and identifiable, enabling us to reach out to the owner to fix things quickly.
What is most valuable?
The best features Axonius offers are inventory and tracking of the changes. The tracking of changes feature works for my team through recording all config changes as they happen over the period, showing who made the change and when, giving us visibility especially when someone made a change with associated reference information such as IT or Jira tickets, providing insights on the reasons behind the change.
The main appreciation I have with this tool is the governance, as we had a big gap for the NIST and other compliance programs where we didn't have a good asset inventory or maintain the config database. With this solution in place, we are now 100% compliant along with security functions or operations area management.
Axonius has positively impacted my organization, with one great improvement being the compliance program, which has centralized everything in one place. Additionally, with this solution in place, we can track quickly, helping us accelerate the incident response process.
The acceleration of our incident response is notable because in the past, identifying assets and their ownership was really difficult. Now with this solution, we could quickly log into the system, identify the asset, and see the owner, allowing us to reach out to the right people and identify the group the asset belongs to. Having tags assigned helps indicate the application or environment it is currently running on, enabling us to quickly revert changes or mitigate issues that arise due to recent changes, which significantly improves our incident response process, especially containment and remediation.
What needs improvement?
I would add that currently, the tool supports some integrations, but we would expect it to support broader integration with other security tools, observability, or any other cloud integrations.
One area Axonius can be improved is its integration process, as it is not straightforward; there is a lot involved in cloning the instance and other hard changes that I expect to be fully automated, suggesting an agentless method instead of utilizing agents, which feels somewhat legacy but could be improved.
The user interface needs improvement because it is a bit laggy sometimes, making it not straightforward when we want to identify things quickly, leading us to go in different directions which could be better tied together in one place.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Axonius for the last couple of years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Axonius is stable so far.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability of Axonius is good; sometimes we see some lag, but apart from that, it is performing okay. I feel we can improve a bit in that area, but overall we are doing okay.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support has been good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, I was using a custom in-house solution that was not performing well, as well as an AWS solution that did not provide full insights and was more manual.
How was the initial setup?
I purchased Axonius through the AWS Marketplace.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment, with time saved being the measurable metric I would highlight.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I think I am good so far with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing; I do not see any disturbances there, but it is working well.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Axonius, I did not evaluate too many options, but I looked at Precise as one of them.
What other advice do I have?
My advice to others looking into using Axonius is to focus on centralized asset inventory, governance, and ownership. I do not have any business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. I think Axonius is doing well overall. I would rate this review an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Enhance asset visibility by integrating with existing network components
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
What needs improvement?
For how long have I used the solution?
How are customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
What other advice do I have?
Axonius as an Asset Intelligence solution.
Helps organizations and big companies improve business requirements and control processes
What is our primary use case?
I use the system to collect background data, identify cybersecurity issues, and catch exceptions in systems like NetSuite.
What is most valuable?
I like that the tool has a user-friendly interface. It helps organizations and big companies improve business requirements and control processes.
What needs improvement?
Adding more detailed descriptions or YouTube videos about specific features would help improve the application.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the product for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I don't recall any exceptional stability issues, but I assume they've improved with new versions.
What other advice do I have?
I rate the product an eight out of ten.
Agentless and can easily integrate with other platforms and provides robust API monitoring capabilities
What is our primary use case?
We use it for reporting, noncompliance reporting, and identifying gaps. We use it for API monitoring within our company.
And we also use it as a CMDB. Our security team, people within the SOC team, and people within other IT departments use it as a CMDB. We have integrated Axonius with a few of our solutions, so it has good inventory mapping. It provides information like installed software, running services, file shares, patches, and more. We have integrated it with many different solutions that we use internally.
We refer to Axonius as a CMDB, but the tool was actually onboarded for KPI monitoring and to alert against noncompliances. For example, if a device is running with an out-of-date agent or if a device is missing an agent it is supposed to have, Axonius helps us find unauthorized software installations within corporate devices. We use it for various KPI metrics and send out automated alerts to the relevant IT personnel to address and fix those noncompliances.
Right now, we use it mainly as a CMDB, but the tool was onboarded for KPI monitoring and metrics.
What is most valuable?
It's the agentless solution. It doesn't rely on specific agents. We integrate Axonius with APIs, which are called adapters or connectors. Essentially, it's API connectivity between different platforms. Getting Axonius up and running only takes a few days. If you have a server or solution, you create firewall rules to integrate with other platforms. This way, Axonius can communicate and collect data from them without needing much infrastructure. It sits on a device and collects data from multiple environments and sources, aggregating everything into a single console.
It also creates multiple dashboards. Axonius provides preconfigured dashboards that can be customized to your needs. What I like is that everything is in one solution, and you don't need agents running on every process to collect information. Other platforms like ServiceNow rely on agents installed on assets, but Axonius doesn’t.
Axonius is agentless and can easily integrate with other platforms. It uses API access accounts with other security solutions. They support a lot of different solutions. When we first started using Axonius, they supported around 400 IT solutions. Now, I think they support more than 600 or 700. I've lost count.
When we started working with them, Axonius was a small company with just a few engineers, but now they’ve grown into a large enterprise. They’ve been great at fixing issues and customizing solutions for clients. They maintain all of that really well.
It is a good solution; it lets you customize the solution based on customer requirements. They can even create custom adapters. For example, if you have a legacy platform or a new solution that doesn’t have official support yet, Axonius can deliver quick fixes by developing custom adapters. I’ve worked with them when we needed to integrate a solution that wasn't in their supported integrations. They gathered the requirements, asked us what data we wanted to pull, and quickly delivered a custom adapter. They also added that adapter to their product timeline, ensuring it would become an official integration in future releases.
In that sense, Axonius has been fantastic at delivering these solutions. We’ve had no issues with them.
What needs improvement?
Axonius can improve on delivering compliance-related features, like PCI DSS, and different dashboards that work with various compliances. For example, if a company follows ISO, they can create a dashboard that shows the gaps within that compliance framework. They have started delivering some of these features, but the tool still needs to mature for companies that heavily rely on certain standards, like payment compliances or cloud security guidelines.
In those cases, the tool might need further development. However, I haven’t had specific issues because they are really good at fixing things. Whenever we report or escalate something, they are quick in providing solutions.
I think they are very flexible in terms of working with them. But at the same time, they are customizing the solution too much based on client requirements. This might cause issues in the future because if they keep customizing the solution for every single client’s requirement, they might face difficulties in future releases. Integrating every customer’s options within the platform might be challenging to handle.
That might be a risk they are taking. But we have had good communication with them, and overall, it’s been positive.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it since 2021, so it has been three years. It’s been cruising through so far fine. We didn’t have any issues with the platform.
During that time, they didn’t have the SaaS options. Now they have started offering SaaS models. We used on-premise deployment, which is hosted within our company data center. But, it’s been going good.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate the overall stability a ten out of ten. But Axonius has a few things they need to integrate. They need to move forward to get more mature in the current IT world. So I’d like to give it an eight out of ten. In terms of working with them and the company’s flexibility, I’ll give ten out of ten for getting things done, customizing solutions, or providing quick fixes for issues we face. For all of that, I’ll give ten out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
All IT people who work on maintaining assets, ordering new assets, and compliance managers will be looking into it. IT directors and anyone who works with IT, but not the end users. End users don’t have access to the platform, but anyone who works in IT and manages the platforms and infrastructure, as well as compliance people who want to monitor KPI metrics and view reports, use it. So, there are 500 to 700 users within my organization.
How are customer service and support?
They’re really great people to work with. Every customer has a dedicated technical account manager. We usually have weekly calls with them to check on everything. When we onboarded the platform, we had regular calls, and they were always available. That was a great experience working with them.
How was the initial setup?
Since it’s an OVA package, it’s a virtualization package that you can just deploy on your VMware, ESXi, or whatever virtualization solution that your company internally uses. It’s just, like, import it, and then they’ll provide you with a license key. If you do a POC, they’ll provide you with a license key for a month so you can try it out and see how the product is going. Once you’re happy, they can provide you with a proper license for however many years you are going to sign the contract with them.
But, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. It’s not like you need to change a lot of things in your environment. It runs in a standalone installation. They also provide a cluster-based solution. If your IT presence is across the globe and you have huge latency that you want to reduce, you can have multiple instances in your different data centers and then aggregate that information in a centralized cluster and show it in a single dashboard. They started offering this around the same time we began working with them.
In terms of onboarding, it only takes a couple of days. It's mostly dependent on your organization's RFCs, change requests, and approval processes. There aren't a lot of configurations needed. You just need to open a few firewall ports for product updates.
The product runs on a Debian-based operating system, and you can scale it based on your requirements. If you're trying to pull 50,000 assets, the requirements will be a bit different. You'll need something like 8 cores, 16 or 32 gigs of RAM, and probably 5 terabytes of storage to store the data.
One of the good features of the product is snapshots. You can go back to specific dates and check the inventory status at that time. Axonius has an option to take daily snapshots within the product.
Axonius collects data from other platforms, and you can configure it to take snapshots at specific times. It keeps the snapshots for as long as you want, impacting your storage. You can keep the snapshots for ten years and still go back to a specific date to check how many assets you had, how many were identified for a specific noncompliance, and when it was fixed. You can check all of those details going back to a specific point in time and still get that information.
Lots of other products, like CMDB products or cyber asset management products, don’t have that functionality. Other platforms give you live data but don’t provide an option to go back and check how it was ten months or a year ago. Axonius gives you historical information and keeps it as long as you want. You can configure it to store the data for one year or ten years based on your storage capacity.
That’s one of the good features we heavily rely on internally.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Axonius is quite a bit cheaper compared to other solutions. And the amount of value they provide is really huge compared to other vendors. So, it’s based on the actual requirement and how you want to use the product within your IT department.
You can get insights within the platform and see how you can integrate Axonius with your current setup. You can make a decision to go with the POC or something like testing. But I don’t think they provide a free download option. You need to request access to a test engine and then get the software.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Probably, if you have other solutions like ServiceNow, because a lot of companies already have ServiceNow, you might not find much value in moving to Axonius. Whatever Axonius provides, ServiceNow also provides it. So, you need to assess what you’re planning to use it for and check the features that Axonius provides.
See whether you want to move platforms. They have a few unique features within the platform. But if a company already has a proper CMDB or an asset management solution, you should review your current internal solutions and see the benefit of moving toward Axonius. It might be a financial decision or just a couple of features that Axonius provides additionally on top of the CMDB.
What other advice do I have?
At this stage, I would rate it an eight out of ten. The product needs to mature a little bit more in terms of following up on compliances.
Axonius is a US-based company. We had a few difficulties in getting the legal documents signed when we started working with them. If they had an EU presence, our legal department might have directly worked with them, and it would have been much easier. But since they are completely US-based, we had to sign a lot of data processing agreements and deal with transferring data between the EU and US. The legal department had a few hiccups, and it took some time to go through all those processes.
In the future, if they have a regional headquarters in the EU or where there is no data transfer from the EU region to other regions, it would be much easier for companies to start working with them quickly. In the initial days, we had to sign a lot of contracts because when we started working with them, we had to provide some sample data, and they had to sign a lot of DPA (Data Processing Agreements) between both companies and the legal team. It was a back-and-forth conversation, editing that legal agreement, and putting it in place between both companies.
We had a few issues in getting the single agreement signed in the initial days. But apart from that, no issues.
It’s pretty much company-focused decision to choose a solution. If you don’t have any solution for CMDB, I think it’s good to go with Axonius because they have good integration. They support a lot of different tools. Within their platform, you have a separate section per adapter where they’ve mentioned probably 600 to 700 IT solutions that they can integrate and work with. You can also check within the description what kind of use cases you can get from that integration. For example, if you have some kind of vulnerability management solution or MECM or a BitLocker administration tool, Axonius will give you information on what kind of data it will pull from the individual sources. You can create reports, check BitLocker statuses, and see what kind of encryption has been applied and how it is maintained.
It will give you those use cases as well, showing what you can get out of that particular integration between Axonius and whatever solution you are looking for. You can list down all the solutions you use internally within your company and then check the Axonius portal or website to see what use cases you can integrate with the platform. You can at least get an idea before you even try to speak with the Axonius team and start working with them yourself to see the benefits of utilizing the platform.
We don't use it to the fullest. We just use it for a few pieces because we have other solutions for that. But they have a lot of different features within the platform. We are not actually replacing everything. We just use a few bits and pieces, like enforcement center actions, CMDB, and a few other features within the platform.