Product Features

Three Reasons to License AXIOM Cyber in the Cloud

When it comes to your purchase of AXIOM Cyber, you have a couple of different options for licensing. You each have different needs, team structure, and compliance obligations to fulfill, and we try to help you with that by giving you licensing options. 

Those licensing options are: 

  • Machine key: Fixed to a single workstation* 
  • Dongle: A physical device (i.e. a USB key) with a license of AXIOM Cyber on it that can be installed on a workstation. 
  • Cloud License Server (CLS): Any workstation, anywhere, can connect to an available license of AXIOM Cyber from the pool of CLS licenses available. 

*If something happens to your workstation running AXIOM Cyber and you “lose” your license, there are definitely ways that we can help you get it back, so don’t worry! 

Today we want to talk about CLS and share 3 reasons why you may want to go down that licensing path for AXIOM Cyber. 

1. Perform Off-Network Collections 

With a larger than ever remote workforce, or one that is working from home, it’s inevitable that you’re going to run into a case where you are going to have to collect data from a remote endpoint that isn’t connected to your corporate network, say through VPN. 

With AXIOM—available to customers with CLS licensing of AXIOM Cyber—you have the ability to reliably collect data from off-network endpoints! 

We recently ran a survey where we gathered the thoughts and opinions of corporate digital forensics investigators and when asked about what challenges have made their jobs most difficult during the pandemic, the number one challenge that respondents strongly agreed was a challenge was that of collecting data from off-network endpoints.  

Here’s a sneak-peek at that question from the survey: 

To learn more about off-network collection and see a demo of it, check out a webinar we recently did titled Adapting Corporate Investigations Within A Pandemic

2. Run AXIOM Cyber in the Cloud 

AXIOM Cyber also has the ability for CLS customer to run AXIOM Cyber on Window Server 2019 which can then be used in an AWS EC2 instance! Again, another big one that our customers have been asking for along with off-network collection. There are a handful of benefits as to why you’d want to run AXIOM Cyber in the cloud. 

  • Greater flexibility: Don’t rely on physical hardware that may be in use, simply inaccessible (e.g. on the other side of the world), or may not have the performance specs that are up to the task at hand. By spinning up an EC2 instance, you immediately have access to as much compute power as you need. 
  • Be anywhere in the world: You can create your EC2 instance wherever you need it to be, and more often than not, you’re going to want that EC2 instance as geographically close to your target endpoint. This’ll afford you two benefits. Number one: your remote collection will be faster since you’re not having to send data halfway across the world through Internet cables on the ocean floor

If you’re not sold on the cloud just yet and need a few more reasons to get you there, read this blog Five Reasons Why I Stopped Fighting The Cloud from one of our special guest authors, Rick Whittington, a Sr. Cloud Security Engineer. 

3. Get the Most Value From Your Licenses 

The Cloud License Server license model has been designed to allow you to maximize its usage or in other words: to give you the biggest bang for your buck. 

The dongle license was a very popular license model and our primary one for a long time. It was handy. You could take a dongle, install AXIOM Cyber on your workstation and use it whenever you wanted. 

But what happened when your colleague Sven needed to use AXIOM Cyber too? No problem, you’d pass the dongle over to Sven who was sitting four feet away from you, he would install it on his machine, and he could use it too. The problem, however, is that Sven—most likely—isn’t sitting four feet away from you anymore, he’s at his place and you are at yours. You can’t share the dongle anymore. 

This is why the CLS license is so great, especially now! Licenses are very easy to share amongst your team of examiners who could be anywhere in the world. Now when you need to use AXIOM Cyber on your workstation, grab an available license from your pool. If one isn’t available at the moment, ask Sven if he can check his back in to the pool so you can check it out right away. It’s that easy! And it’ll be even easier with features to License Manager coming soon. 

If you’re already an AXIOM Cyber customer but not using CLS yet, we’d love to chat with you about options. You can reach out to your Sales rep or email us at sales@magnetforensics.com

If you’re not a customer yet, and you to want to try AXIOM Cyber for yourself, request a free trial today

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