John Lambeth and Rick Casteel didn't become CIOs so they could spend all their time fending off Trojan horses, setting Sarbanes-Oxley controls and poring over HIPAA requirements.

But Lambeth, vice president of IT at Blackboard Inc., a $111.4 million e-learning company in Washington, D.C., and Casteel, vice president of management information systems at Bel Air, Md.-based nonprofit Upper Chesapeake Health, found themselves increasingly bogged down with those security management tasks. The time had come to consider outsourcing them.