The Benefits And Risks Of Transitioning To Passwordless Solutions
Security Boulevard, Monday, January 12th, 2026
Ever tried moving five million users between identity providers on a Friday night? It's basically like trying to change the tires on a car while it's doing 80 on the highway-everything is on fire and people are screaming.
Migrations suck because legacy systems are messy. You aren't just moving rows in a database; you're dealing with years of "creative" engineering.
- Schema Mismatch: Your old retail app stores "Username" as an email, but the new ciam provider demands a unique UUID. Mapping these fields without breaking the login flow is a nightmare.
- The Password Problem: If you're in finance or healthcare, you might be stuck with some proprietary hashing algorithm that the new api doesn't support. You can't just decrypt them-you have to figure out how to verify them on the fly.
- Data Rot: Duplicate accounts are everywhere. One user has three accounts because they forgot their password in 2018, 2020, and 2022.
Most teams underestimate how "dirty" their data actually is.