We've currently outsourced some work to a company to migrate our website over to a CMS system. They've requested we allow the web server to make direct outbound port 80 calls to external sites - allowing the entire machine unrestricted access to the internet.
For years we have operated our site without this, and I really don't like the idea of allowing this kind of access from any machine besides our gateway; particularly after a recent event where an application conflict on our ISA server caused it to waste a massive amount of bandwidth.
I can understand their reasoning (grabbing dynamic content from other sources etc), however I'd really prefer them to use the proxy server for all outbound access.
Am I being unreasonable? In my eyes, allowing full access is unneccessary and just asking for trouble...