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
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