Products or services are designed to meet a need. In most cases, many different products or services are designed to meet the same need or purpose. How can a supplier or consumer determine if a product or service meets the need? And how to compare the quality of different but similar products or services?

In a word: standardization!

In a few more words: Standards specify the requirements that must be met by a product or service to be considered as meeting the need.

Standards of practice and technical standards are typically developed by trade associations, often due to regulatory requirements or the need for many different products or services to work together or inter-operate. Standards reflect the agreed-upon requirements.

For example, did you realize that brake lights on cars use exactly the same red color? There’s a standard for that: SAE J 578. It specifies the requirements for “red” based on visibility, driver reaction, confusion with other colors used in car lights and other factors.

Products or services are assessed for conformity to the standard by using conformity assessment criteria. These criteria are written in a way that allows an assessor to determine if the product meets or does not meet the requirements described in the standard. Assessments are repeated from time to time to ensure the product or service continues to conform to the standard. You can imagine that the criteria and requirements could be very detailed and precise or looser depending on the intent of the standards creators.

Standards exist for a very broad range of products and services. In the simplest terms, standards are created whenever there is a need for a level of quality, consistency or safety. Standards can be developed by a single producer, an association, a country or amongst many countries. In fact, international standards underpin many aspects of international trade.

In the world of trusted use of personal data and identity, conformity to standards plays an important role. Standards exist for the secure communications protocols, methods for use of encryption, strength of authenticators and mechanisms for servers to identify each other, among many others. The infrastructure of authentication, authorization and identity technologies relies on standards for anything to work together.

So, if you’ve ever wondered how products and services from different producers can work together without major hassles, they have probably been assessed for conformity to standards. Think about how many apps, web sites, systems and organizations communicate on the internet – it’s all based on standards.