From hackers who breach the data of corporate retail giants to social media sites that sell your information, identity is a hot commodity. The different aspects of an identity hold value for different people. Social Security numbers and credit card data are going to be highly valuable to someone on the black market, whereas retailers want to analyze your Facebook likes, shopping habits and demographic information.

The driver licenses is the highest assurance document most people carry with them but there is no counterpart in the online world. This may start to change as states issue electronic IDs to residents for access to different services.

The world of access and security is exploding. Today’s identity systems are tasked with empowering new categories of users and agents while reaching into the cloud to enable new applications and enabling access from a world of new devices. We’re moving to increasingly federated systems to manage these new realities, but our identity infrastructure hasn’t kept pace.

Consumer and personal identities are tied to mobile phones. Although most of us recognize that mobile phones are not the most secure way to exchange information and access content, the convenience factor reigns supreme. Efforts are underway, however, to make the mobile the best and most secure way to communicate identity.

Consumers wants access to data anywhere at anytime. And while this is somewhat possible at this point it’s not always that easy or secure. The Internet or Things and wearable technologies are going to start making identity easy and secure for all.

The threat of password reuse is growing, despite warnings, with consumers rampantly reusing them across multiple accounts. The habit exposes individuals to identity theft and corporate networks to attack.

The FIDO Alliance released its implementation specification for deployment of secure authentication.The final 1.0 drafts of its two specifications – Universal Authentication Framework and Universal 2nd Factor — will enable members to create products and systems that enable strong authentication across a range of products.

Within the next five years, consumers will be carrying multiple secure identities on smart devices and not plastic cards – a move that could replace all previous mechanical keys and dedicated one-time password hardware for physical and logical access control. This single card or device will be part of an access control ecosystem that provides a seamless user experience and can flexibly scale and adapt, while also delivering growing value to the organization.

The number of Internet-connected devices exceeded the number of people on Earth in 2008 and in the intervening years, the number of internet-connected devices has exploded, with Cisco forecasting 50 billion devices on the global Internet of Things by 2020. Equally impressive to the breadth of the Internet of Things, is the vast array of devices that now comprise it. Everything from wireless cardiac monitors to sensors on cattle that tell when a cow is sick or pregnant, are now connected to the Internet.

Federated identity is a concept that has been around for some years, but are we close to realizing its impact or still waiting for it to be realized? Today’s development efforts focus primarily on the specifications and policy issues that must be addressed to build so-called “trustworthy” identity systems. But these efforts may ignore a critical prerequisite to success – finding a business model that will provide incentives for businesses and users to participate in a trustworthy system in the first place.