Best Buy scales secure AI access with Workforce Identity Federation
As Best Buy expanded its use of Google Cloud for advanced analytics and AI, its technology teams faced two significant scaling challenges: Mitigating risk and managing administrative friction when syncing thousands of backend users from Microsoft Entra ID.
The retailer solved both problems and paved the way for a massive cloud expansion by implementing Google Cloud's Workforce Identity Federation. This direct approach allowed developers to access cloud resources securely using their existing Microsoft credentials without a separate identity store, giving technical leadership confidence that access remains strictly controlled, auditable, and manageable at scale.
Replacing service accounts with direct federation
Best Buy historically maintained complex synchronization pipelines to copy backend users from Entra ID to Google Cloud. Because the organization used Cloud Identity without a Google Workspace deployment, it needed a more direct approach. Previously, Best Buy's Power BI integration with BigQuery relied on service account credentials.
This pattern can...
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