Prabash Coswatte had a peculiar way of improving remote work: he switched off the remote access. At Cardenas Markets, the grocery chain, its former security chief found that an outdated firewall left the VPN exposed to risks. He shut access down overnight. This was during the pandemic, when hundreds more employees needed to work from home. A locked door is secure. It is also an awkward place to conduct business.
- Axis connected people to particular applications, with permissions attached.
- Atmos expanded that idea into web security, cloud application controls and experience monitoring.
- HPE acquired Axis in 2023 to pair cloud security with its networking portfolio.
The night the VPN went dark
The deeper problem at Cardenas was permission. People who needed one server or application could get broader access after logging in. In an Axis customer case study, Coswatte put it plainly: “I couldn’t control where they went afterwards.” A colleague at investor KKR suggested Axis. The proof of concept reportedly ran in less than a week; conversations, deployment and onboarding took about two weeks.
That account captures the sales argument better than a slogan could. Security had to make the permissible task easy while keeping other destinations out of reach. Cardenas’s story is a vendor-published customer account, so its deployment speed should be read as one experience. Still, the problem is wonderfully concrete. A supplier needs a particular door opened. Nobody has asked for a tour of the building.
“I couldn’t control where they went afterwards.”Prabash Coswatte, former Cardenas Markets CISO
A contractor problem acquires an employee population
Dor Knafo and Gil Azrielant founded Axis in 2018, having met during service in Israel’s Unit 8200. Knafo became CEO; Azrielant became CTO. The business established its headquarters in San Mateo, with research and development in Tel Aviv. Its first public product, Application Access Cloud, emerged from stealth in March 2020. The timing supplied an unusually severe entrance examination.
At launch, Axis described an agentless, cloud-delivered service for accessing private applications. Its proposition was to keep users separate from the underlying network and enforce access through policy. Contractors and supply-chain partners were an obvious audience: they needed to do business inside an organization without becoming honorary occupants of its entire infrastructure.
Then employees became remote users too. Axis’s March 2021 funding announcement said it was supporting hundreds of thousands of users and millions of connections. Those were company-reported figures, but they show how the company framed its expanding role. A focused access problem had become a daily operating problem across the workforce. The same question followed each person home: which resource should this identity be allowed to reach?
Four acronyms, one working day
In April 2022, Axis announced Atmos, short for Atmosphere, with general availability planned for May. The platform gathered four functions into one management experience. Zero Trust Network Access, or ZTNA, handled private applications. A secure web gateway inspected internet traffic. A cloud access security broker controlled cloud-service use. Digital experience monitoring helped explain why a connection or application felt slow.
Think of an employee’s morning. An internal finance application, a web page and a SaaS document are different destinations, with different risks. Atmos’s proposition was that administrators could manage these journeys together. The Parts Authority supplied a customer endorsement at launch, emphasizing both access control and an experience employees appreciated. The buyer was the IT or security team; the verdict arrived from people trying to finish their work.
Conceptual model. Permission belongs to the connection.
Axis also built on AWS, Google Cloud and Oracle infrastructure. In August 2022 it described selecting a cloud point of presence using latency telemetry and switching providers when needed. Geography mattered because security added to every journey must remain tolerable on every journey. The architectural claim deserves a pilot in the locations where employees actually sit.
The cost of changing doors
Axis sold business software as a subscription, with direct sales and channel distribution. Atmos launched in Core, Enterprise and Harmony editions, with support options. Today, HPE’s store lists per-user SSE subscriptions with specified terms. The economic comparison is therefore broader than the price of an appliance: subscriptions, migration work, identity integration and administration all belong in the calculation.
Switching itself became part of the product pitch. In 2022, Axis offered a tool to convert application segments from Zscaler Private Access. Eligible customers replacing a ZTNA service could receive up to six months free with a three-year Atmos Core commitment. A discount has excellent manners when it arrives; the contract deserves equal attention when it stays.
Acquisition-date fair value consideration recorded by HPE. The deal closed March 15, 2023.
Axis had disclosed $17 million in cumulative funding at launch, followed by a $32 million Series B led by Canaan and a $50 million Series C led by Spark Capital. The company rounded its cumulative total to $100 million. HPE’s acquisition announcement initially left the price unstated; its fiscal 2023 annual report later recorded $412 million in consideration, primarily cash for outstanding common stock.
What survives the acquisition
HPE already had Aruba’s networking business and EdgeConnect SD-WAN. Axis supplied cloud security for a combined Secure Access Service Edge offering. SSE is the security component; SASE brings that component together with networking. HPE now explicitly labels the successor product HPE Aruba Networking SSE, formerly Axis Security. In April 2025 it announced mesh connectivity and tighter EdgeConnect integration.
The market offers credible alternatives, including Zscaler and Netskope. Application-specific access is shared territory. Axis’s particular pitch combined its access architecture, cloud distribution, monitoring and management; HPE added an existing networking portfolio. For a customer, integration must earn its keep in policy changes and troubleshooting, where an elegant diagram meets a rather less elegant Tuesday.
The useful lesson to copy is a bounded pilot: name the users, choose an application, set permissions, and watch what happens. Test unfamiliar protocols, unmanaged devices, identity changes and regional performance before expanding. HPE’s documentation distinguishes agentless access from managed endpoint agents and specifies connector constraints. A purchasing decision that ignores those conditions can leave essential work stranded. Axis’s original insight remains practical: understand the task before handing out the keys.