Yesterday AV Comparatives released their 2013 Business Software Review. The report evaluates security software for small and medium sized businesses who would not normally be large enough to have a full time IT professional on staff. The report assumes a business running a Windows 2012 domain, and only 25 PCs running Windows 7 or 8.

AV Comparatives rated the products on ease of deployment, how easy it is to maintain and administer and how effective the product is. The main focus here is can someone without formal IT training and experience be 100% effective with the product. The report rated 10 products:

• AVIRA Endpoint Security 13.0
• Bitdefender Cloud Security for Endpoints 5.1
• ESET Endpoint Security 5.0
• F-Secure Client Security 11.0
• G DATA AntiVirus Business with Patch Management 12.0
• Ikarus security.manager 4.2
• Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business Advanced 10.1
• Sophos Endpoint Security and Control 10.2
• Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1
• Webroot SecureAnywhere Endpoint Protection 8.0

All ten products tied. If you are in the market for an AV product for your home or small business I recommend looking at these 10 products based on the criteria in my book:

• compatible with your current operating system
• provide real time scanning as well as just scheduled scans
• performs Heuristic scanning
• does email scanning; especially scanning of email attachments
• has instant messaging protection
• can scan compressed files
• does file-open scanning
• automatically sends regular updates
• allows you a trial it to see how your computer system operates with it installed

The AV Comparatives report titled “IT Security Products for Business Users” is available for free in PDF format.