Microsoft’s IGA capability within the Entra ID platform, providing access lifecycle management, entitlement management, access reviews, and privileged identity management for human users across Microsoft and connected enterprise environments.
Microsoft Entra ID Governance extends Entra ID with identity governance capabilities: entitlement management to control access to groups, applications, and SharePoint sites; access reviews to certify that employees have appropriate access; lifecycle workflows to automate joiner-mover-leaver processes; and Privileged Identity Management for just-in-time elevated access for human administrators. That model is built around people, employment records, and a review cadence. The gap appears when the identity in question is not a person. Workload identities — microservices, AI agents, and CI/CD pipelines — operate on a deployment cadence rather than an HR cadence. They may exist for seconds, spin up thousands of times per day, and never appear in any HR or Entra ID entitlement system. Aembit governs runtime access for those non-human identities: policy-based, secretless, and attestation-driven. The two tools address different identity populations in the same enterprise and are both needed in a mature Microsoft-centric environment.
Aembit does not replace Microsoft Entra ID Governance. Entra ID Governance governs human identity lifecycle, access certification, and entitlement management — problems Aembit was not designed to solve.
Organizations running Entra ID Governance can use Aembit alongside it to govern the non-human identity layer that Entra ID Governance cannot cover.
Aembit’s attestation-based audit logs for workloads and AI agents can feed the same SIEM and compliance workflows that Entra ID Governance access review data and audit logs already flow into. This produces a unified compliance picture across both identity types: Entra ID Governance provides the human access review record, Aembit provides the runtime non-human access record, and both contribute to SOC 2, NIST SP 800-207, and PCI audit evidence without requiring separate reporting overhead.
Organizations running Microsoft Sentinel or other Microsoft security tools can ingest Aembit’s workload attestation logs alongside Entra ID Governance’s human access data, giving security teams comprehensive visibility across both identity populations in a single pane.
Microsoft Entra ID Governance and Aembit govern different identity populations in the same enterprise environment.
Entra ID Governance handles human identity: entitlement management packages that define what access employees should have to applications and groups, periodic access reviews that certify whether that access is still appropriate, lifecycle workflows that automate provisioning and deprovisioning based on HR events, and Privileged Identity Management that controls just-in-time elevated access for human administrators. It works well for organizations already running Microsoft 365 and Azure that want identity governance natively integrated with Entra ID.
Aembit handles the identity population that IGA tooling was not designed for: the services, AI agents, and pipelines that authenticate to systems without HR records, entitlement packages, or certification events. These workloads have no joiner-mover-leaver equivalent. They are deployed and decommissioned on an engineering cadence, not an HR one, and no access review campaign can meaningfully govern their access at the speed they operate.
The orphaned credential problem also persists without Aembit. When a developer creates a service principal or API key in an Entra ID-connected environment and later leaves the organization, Entra ID Governance manages the human’s account through the leaver workflow but the machine credential typically persists indefinitely. Aembit eliminates this structurally. Because Aembit-managed workloads use short-lived, attestation-bound credentials, there is nothing to orphan.
Note:
This page covers Entra ID Governance as an IGA platform. Entra ID as an identity provider (SAML 2.0 / OIDC) is covered in the User IAM category. Azure Workload Identity (workload identity federation for AKS) is covered in the WIF category.
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