Zyxel’s SCR 50AXE will appeal to small businesses and home offices that want secure wireless networks without the added expense of separate devices. This desktop router delivers tri-band Wi-Fi 6/6E services, combines these with an integral firewall and Zyxel’s threat management services, and delivers them all at a tempting price.

It looks particularly good value as the price includes a lifetime subscription to Zyxel’s Security Cloud, which enables (deep breath) a firewall, ransomware and malware prevention, VPN proxy, intrusion, dark web and ad blockers, application monitoring, GeoIP country restrictions and protection against mail fraud and phishing. An SCR Pro Pack license adds the Trellix-powered real-time threat intelligence and web filtering services, with a one-year subscription costing around £40.

The router comes with a magnetic desktop base or it can be wall-mounted with the supplied bracket. It sports a WAN and four LAN ports – all of the gigabit variety – while on the wireless side its AX5400-rated access point (AP) claims speeds of 575Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz radio and 2,400Mbits/sec each for the 5GHz and 6GHz radios. The latter two both support the high-speed 160MHz channels, but with gigabit ports all round you won’t see their full performance potential.

The SCR 50AXE is designed to be managed from Zyxel’s Nebula cloud portal. We found it simple to add it to our account. After logging into the Nebula app on an iPad, we selected our predefined site, scanned in the QR code on the label on the device’s side and added it to our site with one tap.

The portal presents a customizable site dashboard with extra sections for the SCR 50AXE. You can check its uptime and firmware status, see the top ten apps identified by the application identification service and view threat management activity. A second table shows total detections for each category.

Up to four cloud-managed SSIDs are supported, each with their own authentication scheme, including the mandatory WPA3 for Wi-Fi 6E. You can decide which of the three radios are to be active, create custom captive portals for guest networks with click-through, voucher, Facebook or Nebula authentication, enable L2 isolation to stop guest users seeing other devices and apply upload and download rate limits.

You should use Zyxel’s application identification service with extreme caution, as its overheads will reduce wireless performance by up to 50%. We tested this using a Dell Windows 11 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TXE75E Wi-Fi 6E PCI-E adapter and saw close-range file-copying speeds between the client and a server on the gigabit LAN of 112MB/sec, dropping to a respectable 87MB/sec at a distance of ten meters.

Running the test again with application identification enabled saw close range and distance speeds tumble to 48MB/sec and 32MB/sec. While the copy test was running we enabled and disabled the service from the Nebula portal and could see its impact almost instantly.

Threat management is simple to apply, with six slider bars for enabling or disabling each individual component, and you can add exception lists for specific clients and IP addresses plus blocked or allowed web domains. Clicking on the main chart takes you to a monitor page with a map showing where threats are emanating from, and the affected clients with the SCR Pro Pack license extending its reporting period from 24 hours to 30 days.

This license enables content filtering, which offers 103 URL categories to block or allow, and you can fine-tune access by applying custom policies to all or selected clients. We also ran our copy tests with each threat management component progressively enabled and can confirm they have no adverse impact on performance.

The SCR 50AXE is an affordable all-in-one wireless security router for small offices. The fly in the ointment is the application detection service, which hits wireless performance hard, but otherwise the router is easy to manage from the Nebula cloud portal and offers strong threat protection measures for the price.

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Veritas Backup Exec (BE) has always been one of our top choices for on-premises data protection. It delivers a comprehensive range of backup and recovery services. The BE Simple licensing plans make it very affordable for SMBs, and BE 22.2 on review introduces plenty of new and welcome features.

Microsoft 365 (MS365) backups now support SharePoint and Teams as well as Exchange Online and OneDrive. Microsoft Azure Object Lock provides ransomware-protected immutable cloud storage, backups to ReFS volumes can be accelerated, anomaly detection protects backup scripts from tampering, and BE now uses the FIPs-compliant deduplication engine from Veritas’ enterprise NetBackup product.

The simple yearly subscription service is based only on compute instances, which can be a physical system, a virtual machine or ten MS365 users. The starter five-instance Simple Core Pack costs an agreeable £489 per year, and Veritas generously includes a bonus instance for an extra ten MS365 users.

Deployment is swift; we installed BE on a Dell PowerEdge R760xs Windows Server 2022 host in 20 minutes. After declaring our physical servers using their IP addresses, BE pushed the remote agent to them while for our Hyper-V systems, we just needed the agent loaded on the host to secure all its virtual machines.

Adding our VMware vSphere host was simple, and we only had to provide its IP address and credentials. MS365 couldn’t be any easier, either: we added our tenant using the link provided by BE and entered the unique device code it generated for us.

Backup job creation is simple, too: you just select sources from the list presented and choose from a range of predefined strategies. These include backup to disk or cloud, and you can add extra stages in the job for local and offsite backup, replication to other disk stores or conversion to VMs, and add an essential air gap by migrating backup data to tape drives attached to the BE host.

BE supports plenty of storage locations, including physical and virtual disks, cloud, tape, deduplicating stores and network shares. For our tests, we created a local store on the BE server, used a multi-TB share on a Synology NAS appliance and added immutable cloud storage using an Amazon S3 bucket with Object Lock enabled.

Veritas takes data protection very seriously, and the job wizard always advises you to enable encryption. You can choose from 128-bit or 256-bit AES encryption and, if required, only allow the user that created the key for a job to recover data from it.

Data restoration is another pleasant experience: you select a source, view its files, folders or volumes, pick a recovery point and decide where to send them. Creating a simplified recovery disk brings bare metal recovery into play, BE’s Instant GRT (granular recovery technology) is used to restore items such as SQL databases and the Instant VM Recovery feature takes seconds to create a new VM from a backup set. MS365 backups require a deduplicating store, and the best practice is to apply encryption at the store and not the job level otherwise data reduction may not be as efficient. We created one job to protect our Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint sites and Teams data and used the restore wizard to recover data by choosing a component and selecting a time point.

SMBs that want every data backup and recovery angle covered will love Backup Exec 22.2. It offers a superb range of features, is a strong candidate for protecting virtual environments, cloud support is excellent and it’s very competitively priced.

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We hoped to include the MultiSync E274FL in our annual group test of “everyday” monitors, but NEC has kept us waiting for this enterprise-friendly screen.

Especially friendly when the E274FL combines three alluring properties: a low price, USB-C docking and integrated wired networking.

As immediately became clear when I put it on my desk, it also produces excellent whites. It’s this, rather than a huge color gamut, that’s most important to office workers after all. The panel’s evident quality was backed up in our tests, where it covered 95% of the sRGB gamut with an average Delta-E of 1.08 and maximum of 3.03. Those are strong figures, even if film lovers won’t be wowed by DCI-P3 coverage of 75%, or print designers by 70% of the Adobe RGB gamut.

A measured contrast ratio of 3,493:1 also confirms that this is an MVA panel rather than IPS. MVA stands for multidomain vertical alignment, and it’s far more commonly found in curved, gaming monitors than monitors aimed at enterprises. Its use here shows that Sharp (maker of the panel and co-owner of the NEC brand) has matured the technology enough to rival IPS. For instance, the faint yellow bias that used to be seen in MVA screens isn’t visible here.

I’m also used to seeing high refresh rates and low response rates on MVA panels, but the E274FL’s 60Hz and 6ms are bog-standard times. Office workers hoping for a speed advantage in after-hours gaming sessions will be out of luck.

IT departments, on the other hand, will be delighted. While the RJ-45 port gives users fast and secure access to the office network, it gives administrators a way to track their assets and even take control of the OSD without needing to touch the device itself. For example, they may decide that rather than allow the screens to hit their peak brightness – stated as 250cd/m², but 297cd/m² in our unit’s case – that the monitor stays in one of its two Eco modes. These lock it to either 30% or 70% brightness, and while the former is dim I found the latter mode to be more than bright enough.

End users should find the OSD relatively easy to navigate. It uses a joystick, with its one quirk being that you need to press right to select an option rather than pressing down as people may be used to. But I don’t expect many calls to the support team to check; trial and error is your friend, and the OSD is extremely quick to respond to commands.

Naturally, this monitor ticks all the ergonomic boxes. There’s a low blue light mode, TCO certification and superb flexibility: 120mm of height adjustment, 170° of easy swivel in both directions, and a pivot mode. Often the latter is pointless owing to a lack of contrast and viewing angles in a vertical orientation, but that definitely doesn’t apply to the E274FL.

I mentioned right at the top that this is a docking monitor, and if you connect over USB-C then it supplies 60W of power to connected laptops; plenty for all the machines in our Labs this month, but I would have liked to see 100W to feed more powerful MacBooks. There are three USB-A ports, and it’s reassuring to see a USB-B port as well; this means you can share peripherals between a laptop on USB-C and a PC that uses the HDMI or DisplayPort inputs.

NEC also provides a pair of reasonable 1W speakers. As their power output suggests, these aren’t going to rock your world, but they’re fine for the occasional YouTube clip and video calls. Before you buy, there’s one final thing to consider. This is a 1,920 x 1,080 panel, and across a 27in diagonal that means text isn’t crisp. There’s a fuzziness to character edges in Word and Excel. This may not have a tangible effect on most workers’ productivity, but a new generation of employees used to pixel-sharp displays on their phones and tablets may not be impressed.

Still, that resolution is reflected in the price. A price that includes a three-year warranty, which covers backlight failures too. If the MultiSync E274FL had arrived in time for our group test, it would have blown away the similarly priced competition for its quality and its connectivity – which is why it walks away with a Recommended award.

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Many business backup solutions require a dedicated Windows Server host, but Nakivo’s Backup & Replication (NBR) is far more amenable as it can be deployed to just about any platform you care to name. It will run happily on a Windows host, but also supports Linux, VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, AWS EC2, Raspberry Pi and all the main NAS appliance vendors, including Qnap and Synology.

On review is NBR 10.9, which includes bare metal recovery where you use its new Bootable Media Wizard to restore physical Windows and Linux servers from selected backups. Malware protection is now available, with NBR integrating with a range of third-party antivirus products, and all MS365 components, including Teams, can be protected.

Licensing is equally versatile. There are five versions available, with options for perpetual licenses or per-workload subscriptions. Nakivo cuts through any confusion with a cost calculator on its website. We’ve shown the price for an Enterprise 10-server perpetual license with a two-year 24/7 support contract here.

For testing, we chose Qnap’s TS-855eU-RP short-depth 8-bay rack NAS and used the QuTS Hero App Center to load the NBR package. NBR comprises three service components, with a Director for browser-based management, Transporters to handle backup, replication and recovery operations, and Repositories for storing backups.

After adding protected systems to NBR’s inventory, it pushed the transporter service to our physical Windows servers and workstations; note that Mac clients are still not supported. For Hyper-V, the service just needed loading on our host, while for our VMware vSphere host, we only had to provide its credentials for agentless VM backups.

Our Qnap appliance received a default local repository but this was on its system SSDs, so we created another on a large-capacity RAID5 pool. During creation, you must enter the absolute path, which can be found from an SSH session using the Linux List command.

Other possibilities for repositories are local storage, network shares or cloud stores. Ransomware protection comes into play with NBR supporting immutable cloud storage from Amazon EC2 and S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, Wasabi and Backblaze B2.

Creating backup jobs is simple as options are based on the systems in your inventory. Just choose those you want to protect, assign a repository, set a schedule and decide how daily, weekly, monthly and yearly recovery points you want retained.

For our Hyper-V host, we chose the VMs to be included, and protecting our VMware vSphere system only required the host to be selected so any new VMs would be automatically added to the schedule. To use malware protection, you declare a “scan server” to NBR, which has the required antivirus software running on it.

MS365 licensing is separate, with ten users costing £252 per year, and it requires a special SaaS repository to store backups, which we found isn’t currently supported by QuTS Hero 5.1. Nakivo’s attentive support suggested creating an iSCSI target on the appliance and mapping it to a Windows system running the transporter service – hardly elegant, but it does work.

Recovery features are outstanding. Along with files and folders, granular restores can be used for MS365 items, SQL databases and on-premises Exchange objects. Disaster recovery is just as good, with Flash Boot jobs creating new VMs directly from the backup repository and facilities for replicating VMs as clones.

SMBs that don’t want their backup software tied to a Windows Server host will love Nakivo’s Backup & Replication 10.9 as they can run it on almost any hardware platform and OS they want. It’s good value, MS365 protection is handled well and it provides extensive data recovery services.

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Hornetsecurity’s VM Backup is designed specifically to protect VMware and Hyper-V environments. It presents a clever management console where most operations can be carried out using nothing more than drag and drop.

VM Backup’s perpetual licenses are based only on the number of hosts, regardless of the sockets each one has. There’s also a subscription model where licensing is charged on the monthly number of VMs being backed up.

A perpetual Standard edition starts at £348 and allows you to back up five VMs per host. You can protect all VMs on each host with the Unlimited edition (£426 per host), while the Unlimited Plus edition on review ups the price to £536 and enables all the features VM Backup has to offer.

And features there are aplenty, with Unlimited Plus 9 enabling support for immutable cloud storage on Amazon S3 and Wasabi, and Azure Blob coming soon. When creating offsite backup locations, you configure these locations as immutable, which brings the Object Lock mechanism into play and turns them into ransomware-resilient WORM repositories.

We installed VM Backup on a Windows Server 2019 host and had our VMware and Hyper-V hosts declared in 15 minutes. After assigning a local hard disk backup repository, we dragged and dropped selected VMs onto it and started our first backups.

VM Backup supports local and external storage, iSCSI targets and UNC paths for NAS shares as backup destination options. For secondary off-site locations you can use physical devices, network shares, the free Offsite Backup Server app and standard or immutable cloud storage. We added a Synology NAS share for our on-site backups and an Amazon S3 bucket with Object Lock enabled for immutable off-site cloud storage.

Two predefined backup schedules are provided, but it’s easy to create your own with the preferred weekly and monthly recurrences, versioning and retention policies. Each job can include replication to the secondary location. You add VMs by dragging and dropping them on the desired schedule and retention policy icons.

Along with a cloud console for managing multiple VM Backup installations, Unlimited Plus adds constant data protection (CDP) which is enabled on selected VMs and set to run as often as every five minutes. Both Unlimited and Unlimited Plus provide inline deduplication for faster backups, and you can view your storage savings from the dashboard.

A wizard guides you through the data recovery process: you choose a VM, restore its virtual hard disk, clone it or boot it straight from a backup to its original host or to another one. If you need to retrieve a file, folder or on-premises Exchange item, VM Backup provides granular recovery technology (GRT) services.

For data restoration, all three VM Backup versions use the Sandbox & Verification feature to confirm the integrity of all backups. Along with verifying data, it runs a background job that clones a VM back to the original host and confirms that it runs correctly.

VM Backup is an affordable choice for Hyper-V and VMware environments. The Unlimited Plus version delivers a wealth of features at a great price, support for immutable cloud storage, adds valuable ransomware protection and it’s incredibly easy to use.

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