Identity Migration: Why it Feels Scary, and Necessary Steps for a Smooth Transition

Identity platforms are an organization's backbone of secure access. But what happens when you need to migrate from one identity provider to another? The stakes are high: downtime, broken integrations, compliance gaps, and user frustration. Yet, with the right strategy and preparation, these fears can be addressed head-on.

Identity migration is intimidating

If a migration is poorly planned and executed, it can mean lost productivity, frustrated customers, and a hit to your business' bottom line.

Identity touches every corner of an organization, from HR systems to customer portals. Beyond downtime, migrations often expose brittle integrations, undocumented dependencies, and legacy technologies that no one wants to touch. Add compliance requirements (SOC2, HIPAA, DORA) and the pressure mounts. Even well-planned transitions can surface unexpected issues, edge cases, and broken processes.

Why consider identity migration at all?

Why migrate at all? Often, it's about cost savings, streamlining and automating processes, creating a better identity foundation to build on, improving compliance, and developing an improved security posture.

Some organizations want to unify identity across cloud and on-prem systems. Others are escaping fragmented pricing models or seeking flexibility when it comes to integrating other tools.

The real value comes post-migration. When done right, an identity migration can become a catalyst for modernization.

Strategies to mitigate identity migration challenges

Phase 1: Define goals

Start with a clear understanding of the desired outcomes of your identity migration. Is the goal to reduce licensing costs? Improve security posture? Better enable compliance? Or simplify your team's task list?

Make sure to involve and align stakeholders across the business. Their buy-in is crucial to clarify specific business objectives, identify dependencies, and bring to light other requirements that might be overlooked. These stakeholders can also assist with support by encouraging user adoption.

Consider any measurable metrics of success, like a reduced helpdesk ticket volume or hours saved on tasks.

Phase 2: Discovery

Build a complete picture of all users, groups, applications, MFA policies, SCIM connections, and integrations currently managed by your identity provider. This process helps to uncover dependencies or areas that pose risks to a migration.

Phase 3: Planning and Design

Once discovery is complete, the planning and design phase lays out the foundation for a smooth migration. This begins with mapping existing identity features, such as MFA policies, custom claims, and application connectors, and identifying equivalents in the new system.

Consider developing a phased migration strategy. Segment users and applications into manageable waves based on business unit, user group, or criticality.

To further reduce risk, fallback plans must be documented, including dual-run environments or rollback procedures. Before any production changes are made, leverage sandbox environments to minimize surprises during cutover.

Phase 4: Making the move

The execution phase is where planning turns into action. It begins with migrating user accounts using bulk import tools, whether through CSV files, APIs, or directory synchronization. Applications are then transitioned by rebuilding or importing SSO and SCIM connectors, either from a catalog of supported integrations or through custom configurations. Then, security policies such as MFA rules, password requirements, and group mappings must be replicated to maintain consistency. Before full deployment, pilot groups are used to test the new environment in parallel, allowing teams to identify and resolve issues early. The final cutover is executed in stages, shifting traffic gradually across employees, applications, or customer cohorts to minimize disruption and ensure a controlled transition.

Phase 5: Review & Optimize

The final part is to validate success by monitoring key adoption metrics, including login success rates, MFA challenge completion, and helpdesk call volume, to ensure users are successfully transitioning to the new platform. This is also the optimal time to optimize the system by fine-tuning MFA settings, access policies, and workflows to maximize both security and operational efficiency. Finally, conducting a debrief to document what was done ensures that if subsidiaries' migrations are needed, we have everything we need.

Conclusion

Identity migration is scary because it matters. It's not just about switching platforms. It's about protecting access, enabling productivity, and shielding organizations from harm. With the right strategy, it's not just survivable, but transformative.

About the Author: Jeffrie Budde is a Full Stack Engineer with nearly a decade of experience designing, building, and securing scalable systems. In his role as a Sales Engineer at One Identity, he bridges technical innovations with business impact. His career spans end-to-end product development, research, and security leadership. He’s led initiatives ranging from reverse engineering and vulnerability mitigation to architecting high-performance cloud environments and integrating AI/ML into production workflows, and thrives at the intersection of technology, strategy, and customer success aligning engineering excellence with business outcomes.