Workforce Identity
Workforce identity is the set of digital identities belonging to the people who work for or with an organization: employees, contractors, and partners. Workforce identity management (workforce IAM) governs how those identities are created, authenticated with SSO and MFA, granted access to company systems, reviewed, and removed.
It is the population an HR system knows about, which is what separates it from CIAM (customers, optimized for conversion) and non-human identity (service accounts, workloads, and agents, which have no HR record). Because access is granted for a job, the lifecycle is driven by joiner-mover-leaver events and pushed to applications through SCIM, and authentication is held to a higher bar: NIST SP 800-63B-4 requires phishing resistance at AAL3, which is where workforce passkey and security-key rollouts aim. Google Cloud uses "Workforce Identity Federation" as the name of a feature for signing employees in from an external identity provider; it is a product, not a separate concept.
See also: what is workforce identity, what is IAM, IDaaS, identity provider, workforce IAM vendors
Related on Start with Identity
- GlossaryConsent Management
Consent management is the capture, storage and enforcement of a user's consent to specific data processing and communications, with a record of what they were s
- GlossaryIAM
IAM stands for identity and access management: the policies, processes and technology an organization uses to make sure the right identities (people and machine
- GlossaryIdentity Orchestration
Identity orchestration is the practice of running login, registration, verification and access journeys as configurable flows that call several identity service
- BlogAmazon says more than 500 million customers have turned on passkeys
Amazon updated its passkey announcement on October 20 to say more than 500 million customers have enabled passkeys, which it says sign in about six times faster
- PodcastIdentity at the Center
The longest-running weekly show on identity and access management programs, hosted by two practitioners. The best single feed for keeping up with the field.
- PodcastOkta
Okta's 2023 interview series for product managers and marketers on using customer identity to build better experiences. One season, 14 episodes.