... like anything else. David Grant, director of product management at Watchfire Corp. in Waltham, Mass., thinks there are lots of reasons to put IT security in the hands of strangers. For one thing, he says, you may not have internal expertise in areas such as developing and deploying secure applications. That's where Watchfire's AppScan service comes in. Grant claims that it can test Web-based apps over a virtual private network to see if they have buffer overflow problems or other security holes. Starting at $4,500 per month, the service is continually being updated to monitor for "new types of hacks," Grant says. "It's a bit of an arms race between IT and hackers."

Collaborate without the complexity ...

... of supporting a collaborative app. Small and midsize businesses, and even large ones, often struggle with deploying and managing big programs like Lotus Notes -- so much so that many of you don't even try. Well, Farzin Arsanjani thinks he has a service just for you: HyperOffice. Arsanjani, president of the appropriately named HyperOffice Inc. in Rockville, Md., says his company's Web-based service gives end users e-mail services and lets them share documents and calendars; link messages, documents and tasks; maintain version control over files; and much more -- all within a customized portal. By mid-May, Outlook users will be able to share their calendars with one another and with HyperOffice calendar users without the need for Exchange, according to Arsanjani. Pricing averages $7 a month per end user.

Archive all messages that are stored ...

... electronically, at close to real time. Arthur Riel, chief technology officer at Lighthouse Global Technologies LLC in Stamford, Conn., spent five years developing e-mail compliance tools in the financial services industry. Now Riel claims that he has the tool he always wanted when he was inside IT: E-Trail Digital Archive. Lighthouse's software captures and indexes data in near real time, Riel says. It works with messages and attachments in Exchange, Notes or any POP3 mail system. The archive is stored in a database and linked to your network directory so you can search against a specific individual's content or an entire group's. Lighthouse plans to go public with E-Trail in mid-May. Pricing starts at about $10,000.