If you prefer to buy your business security platform from an established name, there is nothing more certain on the market than Symantec. However, you should still pay attention to capabilities and SKUs, as the company has made some changes in this matter recently. Its current business endpoint protection product is Symantec Endpoint Protection Cloud (starting at $ 28 per device per year), but it is distributed across four floors, so you need to consider carefully what you are buying. And although the cloud has been adopted as a distributed mechanism, this product still focuses heavily on Microsoft Windows endpoints; Although in this update we discovered that it also adds support for Mac operating systems as well as some mobile device management (MDM) features. However, while it all creates a solid business protection platform, it is still only slightly inferior to the winners Editorial Choice, Bitdefender GravityZone Elite and ESET Endpoint Protection Standard, especially when reporting.

When investigating this product, you will find it offered in four versions. The Endpoint Protection Cloud product we assess here is actually offered at two different price tiers. One is the tier above each device mentioned above, starting at $ 2.50 per device per month or $ 28 per device per year. However, you can also purchase it on a per-user basis, where it will give you $ 4.50 per user per month or $ 49 per user per year and you will be able to install It's on 5 devices per user. If you are still running some local versions of Microsoft Windows Server, there is also a version Symantec Endpoint Protection Cloud for that version, for $ 3.50 per server per month or $ 38 per server per year. A good price and you will be able to manage your server security through online control panel just like your end user devices.

Finally, the pricing tree Endpoint Protection has a Drive Encryption layer listed separately as the fourth layer. We'd like to see this option included in the base package, but Symantic has broken it down into an optional add-on that will give you $ 9 per drive per month or $ 97 per drive per year. We did not test drive encryption as part of this review, although we did test the product's enterprise-grade ransomware protection features as you will see below.

Symantec Endpoint Protection Cloud setup has been streamlined since previous versions. Before installing, the client needs to be registered via your Microsoft ID. Now, you can simply create a network deployment package that can be pulled from one computer to another or pushed out through some other means.

A 60-day trial is available on their website. The software only takes a minute or two to install and a friendly "You are protected" message appears. Still no index really shows whatever is going on during the installation process, and I wonder briefly if it is working. However, the latency is so minimal that it does not matter.

The client software doesn't have much to say about the user interface (UI) because the main action occurs in the cloud management console. There is an Enhancement worth mentioning, but it only serves the purpose of showing the results of the current policy applied to the device. Manually scanning malware can also be triggered, but this is often a rare event because real-time detection is always on.