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What are the benefits of an ISO standard?

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ISO was founded with the idea of answering a fundamental question: “what’s the best way of doing this?”

It started with the obvious things like weights and measures, and over the last 50 years has developed into an extremely wide family of standards that cover everything from the shoes we stand in, to the Wi-Fi networks that invisibly connect us to each other.

When dealing with products conforming to International Standards, product manufacturers can have confidence that:

  1. Solutions can be developed relying on a comprehensive specification which is maintained over time by ISO and will always be openly available.
  2. Products can interoperate seamlessly; which means that devices from one manufacturer can work with other devices independently developed by other manufacturers.
  3. New products can be developed at any moment in time in case the manufacturers of existing components should go out of business.
  4. Product deployment will be subject to openly available, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing terms as required by the ISO patent policy.

Moreover, International Standards ensure that end-users:

  1. are not locked into proprietary solutions, but can switch from technology providers to any other without changing the standard components of their own products;
  2. will always be able to use and retrieve their data thanks to the open availability of the standard specifications;
  3. will be able to transparently share their data without the need to adapt them according to the nature of the receiving device.

Regulators and governments count on ISO standards to help develop better regulation, knowing they have a sound basis thanks to the involvement of ISO as a governing entity supervising the standards development process.

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