NCircle announced on Monday the release of a widget that analyzes IT systems for security vulnerabilities.

The PureCloud Risk Center Widget for Spiceworks (News - Alert) is designed for small to medium sized businesses which use Spiceworks. It will give users information such as security news and results from vulnerability scans. Since PureCloud, as its name suggests, runs from the cloud, there is no hardware or software installation. It scans internal and external networks, web applications and Amazon clouds for vulnerabilities.

The widget includes a feature called SmartScan, which scans for zero-day threats and runs automatically without needing any setup or configuration from IT personnel. Users receive alerts as threats are detected

NCircle cites two statistics that make a cloud-based security solution compelling. About 70 percent of security threats target weaknesses in web application security and in 2013 alone; cloud usage by small businesses is expected to increase threefold.

The San Francisco-based company provides solutions for security and risk management that can be setup at customers' facilities, in the cloud, or both. They help companies deal with compliance and risk issues and compare the performance of their security with other companies in their industry.

NCircle's objective of having companies compare their IT security with peers makes them a good partner with Spiceworks. The online community was founded in Austin, TX in 2006, and was designed to allow small business IT managers a place to collaborate and in turn, improve their departments' performance. This segment of the market was previously underserved by traditional IT industry information channels.

PureCloud is available at no charge in Spiceworks 6.2, which can be downloaded from the Spiceworks website.  

The solutions offered by nCircle and Spiceworks are not only examples of how fast technology changes, but that the way it changes is different too. Improvements in technology from the past are incremental compared to today: a 720K 3.5” floppy improved to 1.44 MB; a 200 MB hard drive one year cost the same as a 500 MB drive two years later; a comparison of desktop computers purchased three years apart for the same price would show improvements in hard drive and memory capacity and a monitor with better resolution.

It’s conceivable that if you went back in time to twenty years ago in 1993 and asked people working in IT what technology would be like 20 years later, some of them would have spoken in incremental terms about how fast computers would be and how large their memory would be and that you would have super large capacity floppies capable of holding a few gigabytes.

Technology by definition does not stay within a comfort zone like that, not for very long anyway. Just as we do not have super punch card readers in 2013, we also no longer aim for supersized and super-fast versions of 1993-era technology. The Spiceworks community is one example of how the marketplace is about conversations, thanks to the Internet, something that “The Cluetrain Manifesto” predicted over a dozen years ago. Technology has also become less about hard drive and memory capacity because IT departments recognize the simplicity of cloud architecture. Companies like nCircle are happy to worry about the complexity of being a cloud provider for them.