AVG Internet Security 2016 Business Edition review

It's always worth investing in some good security software, even if you are a small business. Dealing with sensitive business and financial data means that companies have a lot more to lose in a breach than private users, who can usually rely on free editions.

AVG Internet Security 2016 Business Edition is the Czech company's latest addition to this close-fought market, promising top-of-the-line protection with a greater range of features than AVG File Server and AVG Antivirus Business Edition.

Setup
Setting up AVG Internet Security 2016 Business Edition is pretty much painless. Most of the work after a 233MB download is done by simply running the installer and pasting in an activation code. After a couple of minutes of installing, we had the option to add the location of a managed server, which can be skipped. From that point onwards, it was up and running.

The whole process takes less than five minutes, providing you've got an internet connection with decent download speeds. And despite the software's name, it's straightforward enough that it requires little or no professional-level IT knowledge to get going.

Features
It's expected these days that internet security suites go well beyond a simple firewall, and AVG Internet Security 2016 Business Edition is no exception. In addition to an anti-malware guard, it brings together a considerable and varied range of tools, including full computer and folder-specific threat scans; Data Safe, which can create multiple password-protected encrypted files; LinkScanner Surf-Shield, which warns you about compromised sites before loading them; and identity theft protection, which analyses applications for signs that personal data is being poached and automatically closes them if suspicious. There's also a specialised threat scanner and spam blocker for email.

This is a commendably wide collection of features, but the main advantage of the Business Edition over the standard version is the Remote Admin tools. These allow administrators to distribute all user settings from a single server - the server connected to during setup - as well as perform key actions and view logs remotely.

It's good to see AVG including useful and enterprise-specific functionality to help justify the Business Edition's higher cost.

Some of the core tools can also be configured, by admins or savvy users, to suit the customer's preferences. The main anti-malware firewall, for instance, can be allowed to decide for itself which applications to block, or it can be set to allow users to approve or deny permission on a per-app basis. The anti-spam filter can also be made more or less stringent by altering the ‘score', a value given to emails denoting their likelihood of being spam, that must be met to trigger an email being blocked.

Next: Interface, performance and conclusions

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