Internet threats continue to grow at an alarming rate, making it hard to keep protection up to date, while the tools themselves can be really intrusive. Trend Micro’s Worry-Free Business Security Advanced 6.0 addresses both issues, most notably through its innovative new Smart Scan technology, which offloads much of the work involved to remote servers elsewhere.

Rather than maintain a collection of signatures on each client, Smart Scan signatures are divided into those for known threats, such as Trojans and spyware (around 80 per cent), and those mutating rapidly, which it handles using heuristics (roughly 20 per cent). Only the heuristic scanning is done locally on the client PC, with the rest handled either by a security server on the LAN or, if out of the office, a Trend service in the Cloud.

The end result is the ability to distribute updates more rapidly while the local client has far less impact in terms of processing and memory requirements. The new Worry-Free client can also be configured to pause during high CPU consumption, plus it offers a number of other enhancements including protection against threats transmitted by portable USB devices.

As the name implies, the Worry-Free suite is designed to take the worry out of network protection with a suite of tools to protect against viruses, spam, spyware and most other common malware. Customers with limited expertise can get a reseller to install and remotely manage the product, but given that it took us less than half a day to fully deploy on a small company LAN, most small business managers should be able to get by without outside help.

The first task was to configure the central security server, for which we used an existing file server running Windows Server 2003, although any version of Windows from 2000 onwards can be employed. There’s support too for both 32-bit and 64-bit implementations, and for small deployments a desktop PC can be used instead. A web server is also needed to host the management console, which we didn’t have, but that wasn’t a problem as the setup program installing Apache on our server could handle this side of things.

We then needed to distribute the security agent to our other servers, desktops and notebooks, for which a variety of tools are available. In our case we opted to push the software out centrally via the web console, which worked reasonably well, except for a couple of PCs where we emailed the users a link for them to install locally. Alternatively, we could have added the link to an internal web site, used login scripts or created a custom package for distribution using Windows group policy or a third-party distribution tool.

Regardless of deployment method, the agent took just a couple of minutes to install and once in place started protecting the PC straight away. Moreover, unlike some security tools, the default settings are likely to suit most customers’ needs. So, for example, Smart Scan is turned on by default and updates retrieved from the server on an hourly basis. Another nice feature is the availability of different security profiles for when users are in the office and connected to the LAN, or when out and about.

A security agent for Exchange is also included, although on our network we had an SMTP server and a lot of small businesses will use hosted services. Fortunately, that’s not a problem as you also get a bundled licence for Trend’s hosted security scanner, InterScan Messaging Hosted Security. To use this we simply provided Trend with our domain name, and then had our DNS records updated to point incoming mail at the InterScan servers. That done, messages were filtered for viruses and spam before being forwarded to our local SMTP mail server as normal.

Other things we liked included the ability to disable Windows autorun when a USB device was connected to a client, graphical management of quarantined files, and the ability in this release to filter and block access to specific types of web site. The fact that users hardly noticed what was going on was a major plus too, the Smart Scan technology making the Worry-Free client far less of a drain compared with a lot of alternatives.

On the downside, Worry-Free is a Windows-only solution with no protection available for either Apple Mac or Linux systems. Another potential concern was that, like other security suites, it might prove a little too comprehensive for its own good, but with Worry-Free Business Security Advanced 6.0, Trend seems to have found the right balance between security and ease of use. Indeed, once configured, we found it very straightforward to manage with little day-to-day administration required other than the occasional check of the web-based console to see what it was up to.