Hey, fellow Google Admins. This is Goldy. Again, Welcome to the Google Cloud Identity course.

In this video, let's talk about the difference between Google Cloud Identity and Google's Identity platform. I've seen this question a few times, so I thought to make a video on that and make it part of our Google Cloud Identity course.

So for that, let me share my slides and let's talk about the difference between Google Cloud Identity and Identity platform.

For that, let's understand this, Google has two different identity offerings, and let's start with the Google Identity platform where platform is a keyword.

So as a developer, when you are developing an application, you will need to have an identity module so that you can recognize a user and then you can give him certain rights within your application to do certain things.

For example, when I log into Facebook, Facebook recognizes me as Goldy, and then let me do certain things which I'm authorized to.

So when you are developing an application, you will also need to have that identity layer and to build that identity layer, you have two options, option number one, you can build it by yourself, which means you will build the authentication module, which might include things like login, password reset, multi factor authentication, and a bunch of others.

Now, building this identity layer by yourself is certainly possible, and a lot of developers have been doing this, but it is time consuming. 

Another option, option number two, is to go with Google Identity platform, but instead of building it by your own, you just plug and play Google's Identity module, so things like login, password, reset, MFA, SAML etc is handled by Google Identity platform itself so that you don't need to consume time there.

It is good for application or software developers where you can plug and play Google's Identity into your application. It is also known as Customer Identity in Identity industry because essentially you are developing an application for your customers and you will be using Google's Identity platform for that.

Now the second product is called Google Cloud Identity, which is our focus for this Google Cloud Identity course, where you will be leveraging Google's Cloud Identity as your centralized identity provider primarily for your workforce. 

So for example, if your users will need to log into 10 different applications every single day, you can have Google Cloud Identity as your centralized identity provider.

Then you can connect with those 10 applications for user lifecycle management and for authentication so that once your user logged in to Google Cloud Identity, their dashboard would have those 10 applications. They can just do one click to access those 10 applications without a need to enter their credentials.

Again, assuming those 10 applications support some sort of authentication protocol like SAML where you can use Google as your centralized identity provider and it is also known as Workforce Identity in the identity world.

So to summarize, in case, if you are a developer developing an application for your customers and you do not want to invest your time building your own identity module, you can plug and play Google's Identity Platform.

In case if you want to use your centralized identity provider, which can help your workforce, including your full time part time employees and contractors be able to access different applications seamlessly without a need to put their credentials in all those applications, then you should go for Google Cloud Identity which is the focus of this course.

I hope this video was helpful for you to understand the difference between Google's Identity products, Identity platform and Google Cloud Identity.

In case if you have any questions or feedback or comments, do not hesitate to put that under this video, and I will be happy to collaborate. Thank you so much.