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.