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Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium Review

A solid offering, yet slightly lesser than its Enterprise cousin

editors choice horizontal
4.5
Outstanding
Updated September 17, 2019

The Bottom Line

Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium offers a powerful business-grade security suite. It is easy to use yet has comprehensive controls. Stands out for its powerful detection capabilities and anti-ransomware protection features.

PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.

Pros

  • Provides best of class ease of use, reliable detection and protection capabilities, and a reliable policy management function.

Cons

  • Doesn't have rollback capabilities for successful ransomware exploits.
  • Has a cumbersome setup process for initial patch management.

Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium Specs

Ransomware Vaccine Yes
Linux Version
Malicious Website and Anti-Phishing Defense
External Device Control
Firewall
Ransomware File Rollback / Decryption
Graphical Attack Forensics
Policies Target Device
Manage by Group
Manage by Tag
Linux Client
Apple macOS Client
Windows Client
Full Audit Log
Mobile Device Management
Mobile Agent for Android
Mobile Agent for iOS
Native Encryption Management
VPN Included
Patch Management
Root Cause Analysis
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)

Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium (formerly Bitdefender GravityZone Elite), starting at $81 per unit for five units, billed annually, is the leading business-grade hosted endpoint protection solution in our review roundup. An Editors' Choice selection, it works equally well on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms with full support for modern mobile platforms. The stack of solutions is comprehensive and can suit the needs of small to midsize businesses (SMBs) as well as larger organizations. Business Security Premium features antivirus (AV), anti-malware, software firewall, content control, device control, and Microsoft Exchange protection on the server-side.

In our latest round of testing, we expanded our scope to cover not only its standard endpoint protection features, including anti-malware testing, but also more advanced attacks—especially how it handles ransomware protection for businesses. The good news is, Bitdefender did just as well in these tests, making it an all-around winner for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) looking for a one-stop endpoint security solution.

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User Interface and Features

GravityZone Business Security Premium's client user interface (UI) is nicely light and is mostly locked down by default, which is also good. Even in this state, however, it shows some significantly helpful information when threats are detected. One important tidbit worth noting is that it's the first software package I've seen that can provide a play-by-play recounting of the attack.

The default dashboard is useful, and also required if you want to perform any real management on enrolled devices. It contains a trend line of malware activity as well as drilldown capabilities of each portlet. The dashboard layout can be customized with a veritable army of useful portlets that can be organized in ways most useful to your organization. What I found unique was the ability to launch a scan directly from some of the portlets. This aspect of Business Security Premium was a big win for me.

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Bitdefender Gravity Zone Business Security Premium - Hyper Detect
(Credit: PCMag)

Another useful feature is the ability to define the installer packages that are distributed to client machines. Since not all modules will be useful in all situations, an administrator can select between Advanced Threat Control, Firewall, Content Control, and an optional Power User module to include in the installer. In addition, some installation settings, such as Uninstall Password, Scan Before Installation, and Install to a Custom Path, are also available.

The Policies page is where GravityZone Business Security Premium outshines the other products I tested. Policies control the aggressiveness and enablement of different GravityZone modules. For instance, you can specify if the firewall is enabled, what kind of web traffic is allowed, and what kinds of devices can be plugged into the system. Besides being able to add and manage policies, those policies can be automatically applied depending on what network you find your computer on. While the rules can get a bit complicated, it's powerful enough that admins can define separate policies for when employees connect from coffee shops versus when they log in from the office.

On the data-gathering side, there are many reports from which to choose. None of them seemed out of place or useless as is often the case when companies try to inflate the number of canned reports these kinds of systems provide. Each report can be run against all devices, against a single device, or against multiple groups of computers and devices as defined by your IT admin. The reporting interval is selected via a pull-down menu and can be scheduled for "today only" or for a period extending backward up to one full year. The report can be viewed immediately or scheduled to email out as a CSV, PDF, or archive file.

Another interesting feature is the sandbox analyzer. For those inevitable files about which you wind up simply being unsure, this feature lets you submit them to the sandbox to be detonated and analyzed. Since it happens in a safe environment, you can simply watch what happens and then be certain whether or not a file is safe when you decide to run it in the real world. While this feature does get launched automatically if a file is not recognized, Business Security Premium is good enough to pick out malware without needing it.


Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium - Incidents Summary
(Credit: PCMag)

Ransomware Protection for Business

Ransomware has also been a big player lately. Bitdefender GravityZone Elite brings a few excellent features to the table to combat this threat. There are three basic ways that any product can help protect against ransomware. The first is to never let you get infected to begin with. To this end, Business Security Premium has excellent machine learning (ML) detection capabilities in place, as well as behavior monitoring that will flag and stop an executable if it looks suspicious. It sits in the ranks of ESET Endpoint Protection Standard and F-Secure Protection Service for Business in terms of capability. The second way a product can help is by tricking ransomware into thinking it has already infected the machine by vaccinating it with certain keys that the malware would look for. Business Security Premium can do this as well with a single checkbox in the policy configuration, but it is only one of two products in this review roundup to include it. The other is ESET Endpoint Protection standard.

Lastly, an anti-ransomware product may offer the ability to roll back changes made by ransomware. While there are a few products out there that do this, such as Webroot SecureAnywhere Business Endpoint Protection, GravityZone Business Security Premium is not one of them. That said, Business Security Premium has brought a lot to the table in defending your system against those that want to hold it hostage, and the test results speak for themselves.


Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium - Policies Page
(Credit: PCMag)

Test Results

My initial testing involved using a known set of malware collected for research purposes. Each was stored in a password-protected ZIP file and was extracted individually. The virus samples, when extracted, were detected immediately. Out of 142 malware variants, all items were flagged and quarantined.

To test protection against harmful websites, a random selection of the newest 10 websites were selected from PhishTank, an open community that reports known and suspected phishing websites. All of the uniform resource locators (URLs) attempted resulted in the website in question being blocked.

To test Business Security Premium's response to ransomware, I used a set of 44 ransomware samples, including WannaCry. None of the samples made it past extraction from the ZIP file. This is not terribly surprising since each of the samples has a known signature. That being said, the response was swift and severe. The executables were promptly flagged as ransomware and removed from disk. RanSim, KnowBe4's ransomware simulator, was also flagged as a ransomware instance as well. Since it's likely these were picked up via known signatures, I proceeded with a more direct approach by simulating an active attacker.

Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium - Sandbox Analyzer
(Credit: PCMag)

All Metasploit tests were conducted using the default settings of the product. Since none of them succeeded, I felt confident in skipping any settings of a more aggressive nature. First, I used Rapid7's Metasploit Framework to set up an AutoPwn2 server designed to exploit the browser. This launched a series of attacks that are known to succeed on common browsers such as Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Business Security Premium correctly detected each exploit and canceled the attack. This performed at or above expectations.

The next test used a macro-enabled Microsoft Word document. Inside of the document was an encoded application that a Microsoft Visual Basic Script (VBScript) would then decode and attempt to launch. This can often be a tricky condition to detect when various masking and encryption techniques are used. The file produced an error when opening, indicating that the attack failed.

Lastly, I tested a social engineering-based attack. In this scenario, the user downloads a compromised installer of the open-source File Transfer Protocol (FTP) tool FileZilla using Shellter. On executing it, it will execute a Meterpreter session and call back to the attacking system. It was swiftly detected and blocked from executing. Absolutely nothing I threw at Business Security Premium got through.

AV-Test, an independent lab that tests AV software, conducted a test in June 2018 to evaluate a series of endpoint security software packages. AV-Test's results gave Bitdefender GravityZone Elite (the older name of GravityZone Business Security Premium) a protection score of 6 out of 6 and a performance score of 6 out of 6. Those results are entirely in line with PCMag's in-house testing.


Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium - Threat Detection
(Credit: PCMag)

Attack Response

Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium offers an excellent response to attacks by giving users and admins very clear and specific information. Users will appreciate the notifications that include the threat type, name of the malware, file name, and related information that comes up as soon as a threat is detected.

However, the level of detail that Business Security Prenium shows is nothing short of astounding. A detailed play by play of what the malware is doing is shown as a chain of events on both the client side and the web UI. This is most useful for digital forensics, but can also hint at the source of the attack and help an admin search for the initial entry point.


Final Thoughts

Overall, Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium continues to be a great piece of software and has a well-thought-out policy management system. Its ability to detect threats in my independent testing was very good. As exploits evolve, this will surely change, but at the time of my testing, Business Security Premium held up well against Windows PowerShell attacks, which traditionally are not easily detected by AV engines. For this reason, we are awarding Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium the Editors' Choice designation for business-grade hosted endpoint protection.

Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium
4.5
Editors' Choice
Pros
  • Provides best of class ease of use, reliable detection and protection capabilities, and a reliable policy management function.
Cons
  • Doesn't have rollback capabilities for successful ransomware exploits.
  • Has a cumbersome setup process for initial patch management.
The Bottom Line

Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium offers a powerful business-grade security suite. It is easy to use yet has comprehensive controls. Stands out for its powerful detection capabilities and anti-ransomware protection features.

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About Daniel Brame

Daniel Brame, MCSD, is a Solutions Consultant and freelance product reviewer for PCMag.com. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium $286.99 for 5 Devices for 1 Year at Bitdefender
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