Workforce Identity.

The identities, credentials, and access rights of an organization's employees, contractors, and internal services, as opposed to customer identity. It belongs to the Identity & Access category of cybersecurity.

The identities, credentials, and access rights of an organization's employees, contractors, and internal services, as opposed to customer identity.

Workforce identity is the discipline of managing how employees, contractors, partners, and machine accounts authenticate to corporate systems and what they are allowed to do. It typically uses an enterprise identity provider — Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Ping, or similar — as the source of truth for accounts, groups, and entitlements, and connects to SaaS, internal apps, and infrastructure via SAML, OIDC, and SCIM. Robust workforce-identity programs include lifecycle automation from joiner-mover-leaver to deprovisioning, MFA and passwordless with passkeys, privileged access management, conditional access based on device and risk, and continuous review through identity governance. It is distinct from customer (CIAM) identity in scale, risk profile, and regulatory drivers.

Defences for Workforce Identity typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.

Common alternative names include: Employee identity, Enterprise identity.