Overview

What Axiom is

Axiom is an on-premises security platform for organizations that want enforcement and operational evidence in the SMB and DNS paths without installing an agent on every endpoint.

A production deployment uses three roles:

• Management Server - Web administration, node registration, policy control, reputation, licensing, audit, and diagnostics.
• SMB Proxy Node - an inline reverse proxy between clients and a protected file server.
• DNS Security Node - a forwarding and caching resolver that applies domain policy and serves configured local records.

How the roles work together

Administrators save policy on Management. Management actively pushes encrypted and authenticated policy payloads to enrolled nodes on TCP 9443, and nodes periodically pull configuration as a recovery path. Nodes report health, telemetry, and security events back to Management on TCP 8443.

The data plane remains inside the customer network. An SMB Proxy Node relays SMB2/SMB3 traffic and can inspect write streams, calculate hashes, and enforce policy. A DNS Security Node evaluates queries before forwarding approved requests to the configured upstream resolvers.

Recommended deployment

Run Management, SMB, and DNS on separate Ubuntu or Debian servers for production. Use the combined standalone_lab role only for evaluation.

Start with the Production quickstart, then review Network requirements before installing any node.