Bring Your Own Identity

Bring Your Own Identity (BYOI) is a digital authentication concept in which users employ their existing digital identity from an external provider to log in to various services and systems. Rather than creating separate credentials for each platform, users authenticate via a central identity provider such as Microsoft, Google, or Apple, and gain access to any number of connected services through it. The principle is closely related to the better-known Single Sign-On, but goes a step further in that the identity is not provided by the organization itself, but brought along by the user.

The technical foundation of BYOI is federated identity. A trust relationship is established between the identity provider and the respective service using open standards such as OAuth, SAML, or OpenID Connect. During login, the identity provider does not transmit a password, but only an encrypted access token that confirms the user's identity. The actual credentials therefore remain exclusively with the identity provider and are never passed directly to the target service

In enterprise environments, BYOI becomes particularly relevant when external employees, contractors, or partners need access to internal systems without the organization having to create dedicated corporate accounts for them. A logistics company, for example, can grant subcontractors temporary access to a specific application by allowing them to log in with their existing corporate identity. Schools looking to integrate parents or external teachers into school portals also benefit from BYOI as a straightforward access solution that requires no complex account management.

A key advantage of BYOI is the reduction in identity management workload for IT departments. Since the identity provider handles the management, security, and updating of identities, the internal IT team is relieved of a significant portion of the administrative overhead associated with password resets, account creation, and offboarding. At the same time, BYOI reduces the attack surface, as fewer credentials need to be stored across different systems.

BYOI delivers its full value when identity and device are secured together. How both can be meaningfully combined in a central device management solution is explained there.