Put smart cards into your plans

According to Bob Muglia, two-factor authentication .. now is the norm within Microsoft.  And everybody else should use it too, because passwords aren't secure.  Admittedly, this is part of one of those "any decade now" Microsoft long-term visions.   But the problems with passwords are indeed pretty unsolvable, and so the dominance of two-factor authentication is a matter of "when", not "if".

One factor will of course be a memorized password/PIN number; what will the other be?  The answer will almost certainly be a smart card.   So one of these years, your PC replacement cycle will need to include card readers as a standard element.

Why smart cards?  Well, what else?  Nobody except maybe the government should be allowed to demand biometric info of you, because if a biometric database were hacked you would have a REAL problem being authenticated biometrically forever after.  (It's tough to create any kind of remote biometric sensor that doesn't have a physically-hackable circuit somewhere along the way.)  And those RSA-style clickers are hard to carry; better to stick them in your wallet (smart card) or cell phone (ditto).  

Smart cards also allow the possibility of easy backup; if your badge for your employer Universal Widget is lost or damaged, you might still be able to get on the premises by using your driver's license instead.

Sun and Microsoft have been smart-card based for years.  Pretty much any outfit that has mandatory employee badges could easily go smart-card.  National health services are obviously smart-card-based or going that way.   National ID cards and the like seem to be coming in, like it or not.  We use dumb cards for all sorts of authentication already, especially at cash ATM and airport ticket ATM-equivalents.

You WILL be using smart cards.  It's only a question of when.