Your team locks everything down with passwords. Some are strong, some aren’t, and most have been reused somewhere over the years. Every month, we field reset requests. Every year, the same breach reports name stolen credentials as a leading way attackers get in.
There’s a better path now, and it doesn’t ask anyone to memorize a thing.
Passkey migration is the move from passwords to passkeys: a form of login that uses your device’s built-in security instead of a shared secret you both have to store. It resists phishing by design.
It’s practical, most major platforms already support it, and the business case is hard to argue with.
Why passwords are still the biggest risk
Passwords have had sixty years to prove themselves, and the data tells a consistent story.
Stolen credentials are still the number one way attackers get into a network. Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report ranks them at the top of the list year after year, and in recent editions they turn up in 88% of the breaches that hit web applications.
The reason hasn’t changed. A password is a shared secret that has to be stored somewhere, and secrets that get stored eventually get stolen.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA, a second check on top of your password) cut that risk a lot and is still worth having. But text-message codes, the most common form, have a known weakness. Modern phishing kits can grab a one-time code in real time. A convincing fake login page captures your password and the code, then uses both on the real site before they expire.
Phishing-resistant authentication closes that gap by design. A passkey makes it technically impossible for a fake page to trigger a login on your real device, because the credential is tied to the legitimate web address. It’s one of the clearest upgrades we recommend as part of a cybersecurity plan.
What a passkey actually is
A passkey is a cryptographic credential. Instead of a shared password sitting on a server, your device creates a matched pair of digital keys when you register with a service.
The private key stays on your device and never leaves it. The public key goes to the service.
When you log in, your device uses a biometric (Face ID, a fingerprint, or Windows Hello) or a device PIN to sign a challenge sent by the server. The server checks that signature against the public key. No password is ever sent.
That’s why a passkey can’t be phished: a fake login page can’t trigger authentication on your real device. It can’t be reused, because it’s bound to one specific web address. And it can’t leak in a server breach, because the private key never exists anywhere but your device.
Passkeys run on open standards called FIDO2 and WebAuthn, backed jointly by Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The FIDO Alliance reports that more than 15 billion online accounts now support passkey sign-in, double the year before.
What passkey migration actually means
Passkey migration isn’t a single cutover. It’s a gradual switch that runs passwords and passkeys side by side until passkeys are established across the accounts and platforms that matter.
A migration plan usually covers three things:
- Which platforms already support passkeys
- Which users to start with
- What fallback exists for the tools that aren’t ready yet
For most teams on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, the groundwork is already there. Microsoft turned on passkeys through Entra ID and started making them a default sign-in for new accounts in 2025. Google has supported passkeys for Workspace since 2023. If you’re in either ecosystem, you can start without buying anything new.
How to migrate without disrupting your team
Start where support already exists
Begin with administrators and power users. They reset passwords most often, hold the highest-risk access, and will give you honest feedback on any friction before it reaches the wider team.
Map your current tools against passkey support before you announce anything. Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, GitHub, Shopify, and most major identity platforms already support passkeys fully. Start there, and leave the unsupported tools for a later phase.
Run passwords and passkeys in parallel
The most common mistake is treating this as a full cutover.
Let people sign in with a passkey on enrolled devices and fall back to a password on anything not yet enrolled. Running both at once gives adoption time to happen without locking anyone out mid-project.
Plan for the tools that aren’t ready yet
Not every tool supports passkeys today. For those, a password manager that generates a unique credential for each login is the right bridge. It removes the password-reuse risk now, and when those tools add passkey support later, switching over is a single enrollment step rather than a new habit.
The business case beyond security
Security is the main reason to do this. The operational wins are real too.
Google reports that passkey sign-ins are about four times less error-prone than passwords and roughly 20% faster on average. The gain comes from removing friction. People stop mistyping passwords, stop waiting on text codes, and stop locking themselves out with an old credential.
Fewer failed logins means fewer helpdesk calls and fewer interruptions.
There’s a compliance angle too. NIST’s 2025 update to SP 800-63-4 now calls for phishing-resistant authentication on higher-assurance access, so for teams working toward those standards, passkey migration doubles as a compliance step.
From password-dependent to passwordless
Ready to start your passkey migration? Contact us or schedule a consultation, and we’ll map which platforms in your environment support passkeys today and build a plan that fits your team.
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