Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Services review

Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Services provides you with a web-based management interface from which you can monitor and configure the protection for all the Windows systems on your network, whether they’re desktop workstations or servers. The Advanced edition also protects Mac OS X and Android devices. This makes it a great choice for any business that wishes to protect and monitor a wide range of systems.

It’s easy to add a PC; a helpful link within the Devices menu takes you to a screen where you can email an installation link to the user whose PC you wish to add, install Trend’s client on the machine that you’re currently logged on from or download a redistributable installer. By selecting the group in which you wish to place the PC before sending off or downloading the installer, you can automatically ensure that it gets the right level of protection. Having multiple groups like this means that you can, for example, assign different URL filtering blacklists to different sets of users.

The web interface is incredibly smartly designed and easy to use, even compared to the high standards set by rivals such as the Symantec.cloud interface. The main page gives you an overview of the status of your protected systems, so you can see which have suffered threats that need attention and make sure that both your licence and each system’s signature database is up to date.

The Devices tab lets you view all your connected devices, sorted by group. By default, you start with Server and Device groups but, as mentioned above, you can also add others. Whether setting up a new group or editing an existing one, a helpful policy configuration interface guides you through various steps. These include choosing whether to give the client software full scanning capabilities and a local pattern file or supplement its local threat information with Trend’s cloud-based scan server, configuring the firewall and the sensitivity of the web reputation scanner, enabling content filtering and time scheduling to keep employees’ browsing habits in check during work hours and giving various control privileges to the client applications.

By default, the local application is simple. It’s rather drab-looking, which might also help to put your users off the idea of playing with it. A status tab show you which components are currently active, when it was last updated and how many infected files its real-time scanner has found. Another tab allows users to manually scan local and removable drivers. Beyond that, the client lets you view logs and access online help documents, but that’s it.

In addition to being remarkably easy to use, Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Services performed very well in our tests, completely blocking 99 of 100 threats. It was only compromised in one instance. In our false positive tests, in which we install benign programs, it was a little over-sensitive when it came to warning us about potential threats. More irritatingly, it also blocked 10 harmless programs and it doesn’t have the easiest process for recovering programs from quarantine. However, its overall performance and massive range of features impressed us, and in a business environment, a certain degree of paranoia on the part of your security software can save you from a lot of grief later.

Unfortunately, this comprehensive protection costs rather a lot. A five-user licence comes to £187 ex VAT, which is massively expensive compared to almost every other business security suite around. Kaspersky Small Office Security is a bit less comprehensive, with only one server licence in a comparable package and no content filtering, but it’s far cheaper at just £87 ex VAT, making it our recommendation for most users.

ANTI-VIRUS PROTECTION RESULTS

Protection Score
This graph is a straight percentage of the threats that were either blocked immediately, or neutralised on a further system scan. Each product lost marks if it was allowed to be compromised. With 100 threats per bit of software, each percentage point counts as one bit of malware.

False positive score: blocked
This graph is a straight percentage showing how many bits of legitimate software were blocked. We didn’t include any scores for warnings here. With 100 bits of software, each percentage point counts as a single legitimate application. On this graph lower scores are better.

Protection Rating (weighted)
Our protection ratings, scored out of 300, award products extra points for completely blocking a threat, while removing points when they are compromised by a threat. We awarded three points for defending against a threat, one for neutralizing it and deducted five points every time a product allowed the system to be compromised. The best possible score is 300 and the worst is -500. The reason behind this score weighting is to give credit to products that deny malware any opportunity to tamper with the system and to penalize heavily those that fail to prevent an infection.

Total Accuracy Rating (weighted)
Our total accuracy rating combines the scores from the Protection Rating and adds scores for weighted False Positive ratings. Each product scores one point for each legitimate program it lets through. We deducted points if a program was warned about and more points if it was blocked. All deductions were based on a program’s prevalence, so the more popular the application, the more points that were deducted. For example, blocking Skype is worse than blocking the Vuze BitTorrent client. In this graph, there is a maximum possible score of 400 and a minimum of -1,000.