British small businesses love free security software

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British small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the biggest users of free security software in the world, according to research.

In an annual international SMB survey, Panda Security discovered that 57 per cent of British businesses with a security system used free software, while the European average was only 38 per cent.

Luis Corrons, technical director at Panda Security, said that the results indicated that British SMBs knew that they needed security, but weren’t willing to spend much money on it.

Of the quality of the free software, he said it was much better to have a free solution than not to have anything at all. By picking and choosing, businesses could create an efficient free security suite from the free products offered by a range of vendors.

He said: “The main problem with that is that you really need to know a lot about IT security to see for example, whether that is a really good free enterprise solution and whether that is a good free anti-spam solution. That may be a problem.”

However, British companies suffered less infections than the rest of Europe: 38 per cent of British companies had been infected at least once, compared to an average of 51 per cent Europe.

Corrons said that this meant that there were good security trained people behind the security of SMBs, proved with 63 per cent of UK companies receiving training on security - more than the European average of 56 per cent.

More worryingly, nearly a quarter of British SMBs (22 per cent) were not using, or were not aware that they were using, any kind of security solution.

The UK’s level of protection (78 per cent) was the lowest in Europe, bar France where just 64 per cent of businesses had security installed.

Corrons said: “This was really low. For example, Germany was 92 per cent. How can you have a computer without anti-virus?"

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