| | September 20137CIOReviewdeal with the very concept of identity ­ because everything ­ from your employees and customers to the things they buy and use, will have an identity. To make the "Internet of Everything" manageable, there must be an equivalent "Identity of Everything". This Identity of Everything will create the unique set of attributes that define who or what every connected item or person is, what permissions those objects and people have, what they do with them, who granted them, and most importantly, how you should interact with them. These identities will also be essential to fulfill the regulatory audit needs of industries and governments, which can be expected to extend compliance reporting significantly as the potential security impact to consumers also grows.We must embrace the concept of everything having an identity. While businesses may now interact directly with customers, increasingly they will be interacting with many proxies ­ whether that is a phone, a car, or some other aspect of their life that exists on line. Understanding who the customer is beyond the device will be essential to ensuring that we have the capability to meet their needs and anticipate those needs before they know it themselves.The Identity of Everything will go far beyond anything we have experienced today. We are used to companies like Amazon tracking our buying habits and offering similar goods that we might want, but imagine extending this capability to every aspect of our lives. Everything we touch will have its own identity, and that identity will be affectedand extend, by our own personal identity. The businesses that can operate in this world will thrive. Those that cannot will struggle to retain the attention of customers. The days of demanding a customer to log into your website will soon be gone. Our social identity ­ the accumulated identity of our online interactions - will become the defining facet of employees, partners and customers alike. Businesses that want to simplify and streamline their interaction with customers are already allowing customers to use their Facebook or other social media site account to define their identity and personalize their experience. This idea of "Bring Your Own Identity" or BYOI as it is sometimes called, will continue to grow as our collective identity footprint moves online. Yet it is really only the first wave of the Identity of Everything becauseas staggering as the scope of this will be, it is nothing compared to managing the interactions of all those devices.The identity of customers, devicesand products of everything must become pervasive to the planning of services for the next decade. Identity will underpin the way we define and build the "Internet of Things" (or Everything) and it will underpin the things we sell and the way we sell them. In the end, it will power successful enterprises to a level of personalization and interaction with customers that most businesses can only dream of today. In particular, IT professionals must embrace these concepts and enable their business to rapidly seize the opportunities to deliver value to their customers if they do not want to be seen as inhibiting long term success.However we approach it, the "Identity of Everything" represents the biggest change that we have faced since the introduction of the Internet itself. The good news is that we have time to start building the tools and capabilities necessary to rise to this challenge. Now is the time to think about the way we handle identity ­ to examine how business plans integrate and extend identity beyond the traditional IT perimeter, and to create a model for deepening interactions with customers and partners in a way that is secure and sustainable.The 'Identity of Everything' represents the biggest change that we have faced since the introduction of the Internet""
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