You keep talking about managing risk but the one thing you are not doing is managing how much risk you yourself are posing to your projects. In this case you do not know enough about networking and security to make a sound judgment. You need to defer to others with more expertise.

Sound judgement comes from thorough analysis, not by deferring without understanding what you are doing. I challenge other posts if they seem to draw conclusions too rashly or to get more info.

-M

Free your mind

But you cannot know everything! At some point, especially as a manager, you are going to have to defer to someone with more expertise. The sound judgment then is knowing who to defer to and making sure you have access to the right people (via friends, contacts, the people you hire, etc.).

Asking on Perl Monks would have been a much, much better idea if you had been more willing to listen to the answers you got even if you did not like them.

I am really concerned for you and your team because you seem to be micro-managing the technology even though you are not qualified to do so. If I was working under you I think I would find that extremely frustrating and I would consider the project more likely to run into problems (over budget, past due, etc.). I understand your desire to be on top of things but you need to let go of that desire to control everything and focus on better delegation, trust in your team, etc.

Update: Added italics for emphasis