Hey fellow Google admins. This is Goldy again. Welcome to the Google Cloud Identity course. In this video, I'll talk to you about whether Google Cloud identity is required or not, in case if you plan to use Google products and services for your business.

I've seen this question coming up every few days, so I thought let's make a video on that and make it part of our Google Cloud identity course.

So let me share my slides, which will help you understand when Google Cloud identity is must versus optional.

So here are my slides and let's talk about this, Is Google Cloud Identity required?

Before that, just a quick piece of information. There are two ways to create Google accounts to use Google offerings.

For example, one is the consumer account, you might have Gmail account in your personal life. You can also create that same Google consumer account with your own domain, such as user at goldyarora.com, but that is only recommended in case if you would be using it for personal life for personal stuff.

In case, if you plan to use Google offerings for your business regardless of the size of your business, you should always always go with Google work account.

Note -: I have some other videos which talk about what are the differences between consumer and work accounts, and how can you convert your consumer account to a work account, So I'll put those in the description.

My assumption is that you want to use Google offerings for your business, so for that, you should have Google Cloud identity in place where these two conditions are met.

(1) You would be using Google offerings for your business, and

(2)  You do not use Google Workspace.

If these two conditions are met, then you should absolutely sign up for Google Cloud Identity. A couple of examples would be that you do not use Google Workspace, maybe you're using Office 365 or some other offering for your messaging and collaboration, but you want to use other services from Google like Google Cloud Platform, Google Analytics, Google Ads etc.

If that's the case, you must sign up for Google Cloud Identity to create those work accounts for your users so that you have more control on which applications are these user accessing and in which context and what kind of authorization should they have when they log into these applications.

Okay, now let's talk about the second scenario where cloud identity is optional.

If these two conditions met, then cloud identity is optional.

(1) You plan to use Google Offerings for your business, and

(2) You already have Google Workspace setup, or you're already using Google Workspace.

If that's the case, you do not need cloud identity, it is optional.

Now, if your question now is, why is it even optional, then great job we are on the same page and for that let me bring you to my next slide where you will see that there are a few use cases where Google Cloud Identity and Google Workspace can both work together.

One of the use cases would be employees vs contractors or maybe a subset of your employees, for example, let's say I have some employees who would be using email and collaboration on behalf of my organization, and it's okay to give them Google Workspace license, but some of my contractors or temporary employees, they do not need access to email and collaboration services.

They only need to access Google Cloud platform or Google Ads or Google Analytics. It's not sensible to invest purchasing a Google Workspace license for these users, and I should rather go with Google Cloud Identity license, which means I will be paying much less because I'm not using Google Workspace for these users.

By the way, we'll talk about Google Cloud identity pricing in a different video.So I'll put that in the description below too. So one of the use cases is this one where you need to grant your users different Google services based on their use case. 

Second use case that I see is when you're doing administration for Google Workspace or Google Cloud Identity, It is recommended that you should have separation of duties like you should have two separate accounts. So if I'm a user and I'm also Google Workspace Admin.

Then ideally, I should have two separate accounts. For example, one can be Goldy.arora domain.com, which is just a Workspace user and then a separate account which is goldy.arora .admin at domain.com where I will have administration rights so that you know, by mistake I should not be performing any administration tasks from my Workspace user account.

But instead of investing a Google Workspace license on this administration only user account, I can rather use Google Cloud Identity license here which would be cost efficient.

I have a separate video where I talk about in a Google Workspace admin best practices. I'll put that in the description below too.

So these might be a few use cases where you can have Google Workspace license and Google Cloud Identity license working together.

I hope now you understand when Google Cloud identity is must and when it is optional and when you them working together. 

If you have any questions, comments or feedback, you may consider putting that under this video and I will be happy to collaborate with that.

Thank you so much.