Turner said the current market penetration of outsourcing security is broadly 41 percent and this rate is expected to increase significantly in the next three years.

To tackle user dissatisfaction, managed security service provider, MessageLabs, offers rigorous Service Level Agreements (SLA) such as a minimum 95 percent spam capture rate for e-mail clients and a false positive rate of one e-mail in 250,000. This latter figure equates to one false positive e-mail every 17 years, based on the messaging activity of the average e-mail user.

Advertising group Euro RSCG Worldwide has just inked a managed service deal with MessageLabs covering 1300 e-mail users across 16 Asia-Pacific region offices.

The company's CIO Ivan Glaser said before the MessageLabs deal, the entire region was operating under different rules with each office IT manager employing a different approach to spam.

"Now we have a universal approach that is easily managed and frees our IT staff from tasks such as identifying false positives," Glaser said.