As a well known telco, Cascade's profile could make it a prominent target for attack. That was what happened to the company a few years ago, when two SQL servers were under attack.

"Although the servers did not hold any significant data, the constant attacks and bombardment of traffic was very annoying and worrying to our management," he said.

The experience remained a worry for the executives at Cascade. Shreves also noted security is becoming a more critical issue on a Windows platform. As you may "expose your clients to the possibility of a wide variety of exploits, which are calculated to disrupt those systems," he said.

But Hong said the significant effort that Microsoft put to improve security has brought confidence to the company. "We have much more confidence on Microsoft's protection and the company provides us strong technical support," he said. "We think it's an appropriate move to take up .Net."

Another concern for .Net is its stability and capability to support large scale enterprise level applications. However from the experience with other projects, the application performance of .Net was very encouraging, said Hong.