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.
In this unit, we consider each type of Microsoft Entra identity.
User
User identities represent people such as employees and external users (customers, consultants, vendors, and partners). In Microsoft Entra ID, user identities are characterized by how they authenticate and the user type property.
How the user authenticates is asked relative to the host organization’s Microsoft Entra tenant and can be internal or external. Internal authentication means the user has an account on the host organization’s Microsoft Entra ID and uses that account to authenticate to Microsoft Entra ID.
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