Panda Software’s expertise in antivirus measures for home users is well established, with its Titanium 2004 winning a welldeserved Value Award in our last antivirus Group Test (PC Plus 224). The company’s forays into the business sector began about three years ago, and while its fi rst network antivirus products offered equally good overall value, they were limited in features and capabilities. The latest BusinesSecure 2005 shows serious improvements, as the software looks to provide a solid range of protection measures suited to small and medium businesses.

The software is available in two versions, one with and one without the additional TruPrevent technology. Essentially, this adds a second defence layer to the core software by looking for virus-like behaviour, and is designed to provide protection against day-zero attacks, before a fi x has been found. TruPrevent goes way beyond standard heuristic scanning, as it applies comparative rules to the code found in scanned fi les. It also analyses how applications behave as soon as they start running in memory, and if a sequence of actions is deemed dubious, TruPrevent can stop the process before a virus spreads.

Securing your admin
Collected under the AdminSecure umbrella, the software suite comprises a repository server for storing virus signatures, an event database and an administration server that processes information received from the communications agents installed locally on each client system. The whole lot can be installed on a single server and managed easily from the AdminSecure console. After installation, a set-up wizard makes light work of initial confi guration and automatic signature updates. It will also take you through installing the communications and FileSecure and ClientShield protection agents onto other servers and workstations.

The console interface is a tidy affair and is the same used by Panda’s EnterpriSecure software. You’ll fi nd the device tree to the left provides access to a variety of servers, including proxy, NetWare, Linux and Exchange. Smaller businesses will be concentrating mainly on the last two branches, which list all Windows servers and workstations that have the communications agent installed. Creating your own groups and subgroups makes for easier management, as you can change the tree to represent your business structure and drag and drop systems into the relevant container.

A set of default global settings is automatically applied to all new members. This may cause a few problems, because the NetworkSecure component will block network access to any system that doesn’t have all the relevant Panda parts installed and functioning. Even so, these are easy enough to modify if required, and you can also select systems from the tree and apply individual settings to them. In fact, general access to each system is good, as you can update their BusinesSecure components, uninstall the software remotely and monitor fi le-scanning activity. On-demand scans can also be run from here, and you can select OS fi les plus all hard disks or selected folders. For the latter, you’ll need to know the full path name, as you can’t browse the system’s hard disks.

When it comes to reactions to attempted viral infections, this Panda certainly doesn’t sit around chewing shoots. We tried to introduce a number of genuine viruses into the test network and, on each system, a pop-up window advised immediately that an infected fi le had been identifi ed and access had been blocked. How a virus is handled is determined by policies applied at the root, or group, so can opt to clean, delete, rename and block access. We also contaminated a server system with adware and spyware programs, which Panda neutralised as soon as it had been installed. Reporting features are good, as all transgressions are reported back to the central event database where they can be viewed by group or individual system. However, alert notifi cations for the antivirus and TruPrevent components aren’t spectacular. All you can do is send a network message to any number of systems, or an email to a single address.

BusinesSecure is offering a comprehensive network antivirus solution with good centralised management. Deployment of the various components is well handled and you can automate most functions. The additional TruPrevent is virtually a ‘fi re and forget’ component and could prove useful, but you can reduce costs to a shade over £41 per user if you opt for the basic version.