IT admins are always on the lookout for new tools to help meet their needs. Last week, I attended SpiceWorld, a conference with roughly 2,000 attendees focused on Spiceworks' IT admin tools. While there, I found several tools that other IT admins will benefit from investigating -- tools you likely are not aware of, but should be.

Here they are.

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Lucidchart

Lucidchart offers a flow chart tool that rivals Microsoft Visio. The recently released Visio 2016 doesn't add anything meaningful, so it may be time for IT shops to look at tools from vendors who are more invested in developing their flowchart tools. Lucidchart seems to be such a provider.

Cyber Advanced Warning System

NSS Labs offers a suite of tools called Cyber Advanced Warning System to poke into your organization and pinpoint your security holes.

Scale Computing

Scale Computing offers a "data center in a box" with server, storage, and virtualization combined. What I liked about its offering is how easy it was to spin up new servers, set up clones, and establish failover scenarios to a server on premises or in the cloud.

DataGravity

DataGravity focuses on data-aware storage that can peer into your data at rest to improve security. It's security at the point of storage rather than only on the perimeter.

Heat Software

Heat Software provides endpoint management and security tools. I liked that it's focused on whitelisting to provide greater security, then adds policies to deal with non-whitelisted apps.

ManageEngine

ManageEngine does a lot more than manage and analyze event logs, the company's main calling card. ManageEngine also offers internal and external security threat analysis and notification, as well as compliance management. I especially liked its ease of use.