2009 Awards: Readers Pick the Best Small Business Tech Tools - Page 3

Security

Security

Security

Norton Internet Security 2009 (Symantec)       Runner-up: Norton AntiVirus 2009 (Symantec)

Backup and Recovery

MozyPro       Runner-up: Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 8

Security

Security software is must-have tool to protect your business from online threats. But it can be frustrating when the software that's meant to protect you turns out to be a resource hog that drags your daily productivity to a crawl. This year's winner, Symantec's Norton Internet Security 2009, is the exception to the rule.

NIS 2009 made great strides in the performance department, which may explain why it won our readers' votes. Everything about the software says streamlined: performance, interface and even installation. All the heavy lifting – like scanning for malware or updating virus definitions ‑‑ runs unobtrusively in the background where it belongs, leaving you both productive and protected.

Benefiting from the same slim, inconspicuous performance improvements as its Symantec sibling, Norton AntiVirus 2009 easily earned runner-up status. While NIS 2009 is a full-protection suite, NAV 2009 focuses solely on antivirus protection.

Backup and Recovery

Keeping your critical data safe and being able to retrieve it should disaster of any flavor strike is paramount for any business. Best practices say you should store backup copies of your data both on and off the premises, which is a whole lot easier ‑‑ and cheaper ‑‑ to do with the advent of hosted online storage.

This year marks the first time an online backup and recovery service has won the top spot, and honors go to MozyPro, a company recently purchased by storage giant EMC. MozPro can handle the storage needs of up to 250 people, which will set you back $3.95 per month per person plus 50 cents per gigabyte. You can use it for a central file server at $6.95 per month and $1.75 per GB.

The name of this year's runner-up is nearly as long as its feature set. Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 8 was designed to perform system restoration or full "bare-metal" recovery for servers, desktops or laptops in minutes instead of hours or days. Happily, it was also designed with a very user-friendly interface.

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