In October last year, media streaming company Virtue Broadcasting suffered a security breach on its network. It came during a critical broadcast for a client, which resulted not just in embarrassment and loss of goodwill but the client's business, worth tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Virtue, which provides webcasts for 35 per cent of Australia's top 150 listed companies in investor relations or corporate communications, took on Curtis Brager as technical director within months of the attack.

"One of the first things I looked at was the security of our delivery infrastructure," he says. A key objective was to compare the cost of outsourcing to managing security in-house.

The business case was clear. "Security is a very labour intensive, mission critical application but not a revenue driver," Brager says. "Because of its constant evolution, it is highly specialised. To manage it effectively you need skilled professionals with very broad capabilities and that's very difficult and expensive.

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