Norton has come a full circle with its latest installment in antivirus suites. Norton 360 was released amidst a lot of security threats and stiff competition from Windows OneCare and McAfee Total Protection, but the Norton tradition continues with its user-friendly features and tool-heavy products. 
Norton 360 is a comprehensive package, offering piece of mind from a security point of view along with additional tools to tidy up your PC. Fans of previous versions of Norton Internet Security will probably identify a heavy system footprint along with a slow and often confusing interface as the suite’s main weakness.
Thankfully both of these issues have been addressed with 360, which is a radical step forwards from what was a rather ageing design. The main interface is split into four simple categories, informing you in each case of the security level or status of each so it’s easy to work out what areas of your system you need to fix. The bulk of the package is housed within ‘PC Security’, which includes a firewall, antivirus and additional tools such as e-mail scanning and intrusion prevention. You’ll also gain access to reports of recent scans, and can set up a scan schedule yourself to safeguard your system.
Elsewhere you’ll find a total backup and restore solution, one of the areas where Norton gets one over on the opposition. In addition to selecting local media such as a hard drive or optical disc to save data, Norton provides you with 2GB of online storage, which you can use to automatically backup sensitive files and folders. Additional storage space is available for extra charge if you run out and you’re given a good degree of control over what is backed-up and when.
Perhaps the weakest area of the suite is the PC Tuneup section, which basically cleans unnecessary files from your PC and performs a defragment. You’re not given a lot of control over this process, but it was a necessary addition to pull Norton 360 in line with rivals.
At first glance this apparent lack of control runs through the entire suite, but delving deeper we realize it’s actually a clever move by Symantec that improves usability to no end. Rather than dominate each of the security categories with control buttons and settings, the majority of them are found under an Advanced Settings menu, where you’ll find the degree of control you need to customize the behavior of the suite. The firewall in particular is very easy to use, and Tuneup settings aside you’ll find everything you would expect hidden away in this effective menu structure.
This makes Norton the most user-friendly of the recent solutions: it would be ideal for new users, students or those who want a quick fix without a lot of interaction. Optional privacy protection and parental control lack power and flexibility. Optional spam filtering is not effective. Norton 360 is a good example of the “out of the box” thinking needed by traditional security vendors today.
By starting from scratch and building an entirely new security product, Symantec has made long overdue improvements to its existing product line. Hopefully next year’s release of Norton AntiVirus and Norton Internet Security suite will benefit as well.