Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Standard review

While more business security suites are being rolled out to public cloud servers, Trend Micro’s Worry Free Business Security Standard takes a more traditional approach, requiring the installation of management software either on a server or a PC connected to your network. This software in turn gives you a web interface from which you can manage all of your employees’ devices.

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While the installation element of the product was reasonably painless (aside from the 800MB download), it was accessing the web interface that proved trickier. Attempting to access the interface via Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox resulted in Trend Micro pointing us towards the Internet Explorer download page. Accessing it using Internet Explorer resulted in the first worrisome moment of our Worry-Free experience: an expired security certificate. Luckily, Internet Explorer allowed us to navigate to the interface after a few confirmation clicks, but it wasn’t the best of starts for Trend Micro’s service.

^ We were astonished to find that Trend Micro’s web interface only supports Internet Explorer

The web interface itself looks very dated, with masses of menus and submenus making finding what you’re looking for a little challenging. The one upshot of this is that there are far more tools and tweaks to be made than on any of the other small business suites we have on test.

The Live Status page lets you glance at the status of the PCs on your network which have Worry-Free installed, and you can hover your mouse over what you want to see instead of clicking, which saves time. It’s not pretty, but in this case it does the job.

There are a huge amount of options, which are available to change, although there is no obvious way of changing them for specific users or machines. You can change options for all servers or desktops, but you can’t tweak them for individual machines.

If you want to be hands-off when your employees take their devices home, the Firewall and Web Reputation services can be toned down for when the PC in question isn’t connected to your work network, so your staff are free to do more when they get home.

There are a lot of options available and while we appreciate the choice, we’d recommend only more experienced users try and administrate their security using Trend Micro because a newcomer may find everything a little overwhelming.

End-user malware protection performance is very good and significantly better than Trend Micro’s performance in our last round of testing. It successfully defended against 97 of the 100 live threats we threw at it. Three pieces of malware were allowed to run on our test machine uninhibited, but this isn’t any worse than most of the suites we have on test. It managed an overall protection rating of 276 out of 300, only beaten by Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition’s 292.

Sadly for employees, the software is incredibly suspicious of the installation of unknown software, even if we know it to be legitimate. It blocked the installation of 21 pieces of legitimate software without asking us first, leading it to a woeful overall accuracy score of 438 out of a possible 846.

Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Standard is an old-school and slightly dated looking security suite. It makes up for this with a huge set of administration tools and excellent malware protection scores, but it slightly let down by over-paranoid software. It’s also a little more expensive than some of the other small business suites we have on test, and we’d recommend  the equally reliable and easier-to-use Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition instead.