Symantec Endpoint Protection review

There is a downside to Symantec’s cloud-based service. At times, we experienced delays both when attempting to access parts of the web interface, including the all-important policies configuration screen, and when the clients’ scanners were analysing malicious programs by sending back information to the Symantec cloud. However, with an overall protection score of 98, Symantec Endpoint Protection provides excellent defence against malicious software. It was only compromised in two instances and also performed well in our false positive test, blocking just two of our benign programs. This indicates that it’s much less oversensitive to potential threats than many of its small business oriented rivals.

Symantec Endpoint Protection doesn’t have all the features of some of its rivals, but it has a great web interface and – at £80 ex VAT for 5 licences – doesn’t cost too much. However, occasional delays when connecting to Symantec’s cloud services meant that Kaspersky Small Office Security was more reliable and more accurate in our tests, as well as having a wider range of features.

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.