Guest account
Also known as B2B guest
An external person given access to your tenant using their own organization's identity.
Guest access is genuinely useful for collaborating with clients, auditors, and partners without creating and managing accounts for them. It is also the access nobody remembers to remove.
Guests from former partners frequently retain access for years. Periodic guest reviews and expiry on invitations turn a permanent grant into a temporary one.
Where this comes up
Guest account sits inside our identity and access work. If you are trying to work out what this means for your own environment rather than in the abstract, that is the page worth reading next, and a short call will get you a straight answer faster than either.
Related terms
Access review A periodic check that everyone who holds access to something still needs it. Tenant Your organization's dedicated instance of a cloud service, containing your users, data, and configuration. Offboarding Removing every piece of access a departing person holds, on the day they leave. Microsoft Entra ID Microsoft's cloud identity service, the account directory behind Microsoft 365 and thousands of connected applications.