GFI Vipre Business Premium 6 review

GFI’s latest endpoint protection software is the company’s flagship product, and adds a client firewall, anti-phishing and website filtering to its standard business package.

It’s lightweight, with an agent that uses only 10-20MB of memory, and the rest of the package has a light touch, too. We loaded the site service, admin console and SQL database on a Windows 7 workstation in minutes. The admin console is easy to use, but its status widgets aren’t very informative, and we question using green as a warning colour in its pie charts.

Business Premium scans the network using the IP subnets and Active Directory queries provided at setup. With automatic agent installation enabled, it will deploy an agent to each of your systems using the default security policy.

It’s simple to create and deploy your own policies, by copying the predefined templates and customising them. The process takes five to ten minutes per system, and worked with domain and workgroup members once we’d added all the appropriate login credentials. You’ll need to avoid clients being rebooted or turned off during this process, though. One of our Windows 7 clients was left with a permanently disabled network adapter and had to be restored from scratch after we restarted it inadvertently.

Detection rates are also unimpressive. In our last antivirus Labs, the scanning engine (also used in GFI’s consumer software) failed to detect 15% of zero-day malware.

Policies control every feature of Business Premium, from real-time antivirus protection to email and anti-phishing scanning. The client firewall can be enabled here too, along with web filtering, using GFI’s own bad URL lists.

For patch management, GFI provides a small list of apps, including all popular web browsers, and runs scheduled scans, checking for updates. The software also ensures automatic Windows Update is enabled for all policy members, and can protect Android and iOS devices, too.

Business Premium provides a good range of features for the price, but disappointing detection rates and problematic agent deployment, count against it.