"You have to retain some form of IT expertise in-house."

Houlahan admitted it is getting increasingly harder to find staff with the right technical skills due to the downturn in people signing up for IT courses.

"This might be reflective of the job market or because of outsourcing, or one element may be feeding off another," he said.

"As more IT gets commoditized, theoretically it gets easier to outsource as an alternative to keeping the work internally, but increasingly IT underpins everything the business does; in terms of risk management, would you outsource to save money and [by so doing] increase the risks?"