The Benefits and Risks of Transitioning to Passwordless Solutions

This blog provides practical guidance for securely migrating millions of users between identity providers, emphasizing strong controls and operational discipline: encrypt data at rest/in transit, use least-privilege API keys and rotate them, remove temporary artifacts, handle schema mismatches and legacy password hashes, batch imports with backoff to respect rate limits, and validate results with checksums, spot checks, and shadow authentication. It recommends using the migration as a chance to move toward passwordless methods (magic links, passkeys) to reduce attack surface and improve UX, minimizing breach risk during high-stakes transitions.