Workforce identity vs. customer identity: What changes?

Workforce identity manages employees, contractors, and partners accessing an organization’s own systems, typically using HR-driven directories, single sign-on, MFA, lifecycle management, and governance, while customer identity manages people accessing a product, including users at multiple customer organizations in a B2B application. A person may have separate employment and application membership records: the customer’s identity provider and directory determine corporate authentication and user or group data, while the application determines tenant membership, roles, permissions, and session validity. SSO connects an application to a customer’s identity provider for authentication but does not alone grant product access, whereas directory synchronization, often using SCIM, can create, update, or remove memberships based on the customer directory. Access revocation requires coordination because an identity provider cannot necessarily terminate sessions or tokens issued by an application, so products must independently enforce membership removal, invalidate sessions, and stop accepting access credentials. Organizations should distinguish authentication, provisioning, authorization, session management, and revocation when evaluating identity products, since support for one capability does not imply coverage for the others.

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