Describe types of identities

In Microsoft Entra ID, there are different types of identities that are supported. The terms you’ll hear and are introduced in this unit are user identities, workload identities, device identities, external identities, and hybrid identities. Each of these terms is described in more detail in the sections that follow.

When you ask the question, to what can I assign an identity in Microsoft Entra ID, there are three categories.

• You can assign identities to people (humans). Examples of identities assigned to people are employees of an organization that are typically configured as internal users, and external users that include customers, consultants, vendors, and partners. For our purposes, we’ll refer to these as user identities.
• You can assign identities to physical devices, such as mobile phones, desktop computers, and IoT devices.
• Lastly, you can assign identities to software-based objects, such as applications, virtual machines, services, and containers. These identities are referred to as workload identities.