By Melanie Turek, Senior Vice President, Nemertes Research Inc.
March 16, 2006

If you build it, they will come. No, not baseball players—virus writers. News from a group of computer researchers that radio frequency identification (RFID) chips are susceptible to software viruses—conventional wisdom to the contrary, notwithstanding—highlights a trend among IT executives, who continue to see viruses as a problem. Sixty-seven percent of
participants in Nemertes’ information-stewardship benchmark, for instance, consider fighting malware to be a “vital” part of their security efforts, and 25% say it’s “very important.”

It also supports Nemertes' call for all companies to take information stewardship seriously. Every byte of data in the enterprise must be managed along five key disciplines, security being one of them. That requirement grows as the amount of critical data in an organization grows—and RFID promises to deliver more data, more quickly and to more systems. IT
executives are faced with yet another malware entry point, and if that data is compromised in any way, it could wreak havoc, putting both their IT systems and the value of the data itself at risk. Not to mention the compliance consequences
from bad data.

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