Your team locks everything down with passwords. Some are strong, some are not, and most have been reused somewhere over the years, whether anyone would admit it out loud or not. Every month, IT fields reset requests. Every year, the same breach reports list stolen credentials as the leading cause, and every year the advice is the same: use a stronger password, change it more often, don’t write it on a sticky note.
There’s now a genuinely better path, and it doesn’t require your team to memorize anything at all. Passkey migration is the process of moving from traditional passwords to passkeys: a form of phishing-resistant authentication that uses your device’s built-in security instead of a shared secret sitting on a server somewhere waiting to be stolen. For businesses across South Bend, Goshen, and Elkhart running Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, it’s practical, it’s already supported by most major platforms you’re already paying for, and the business case is genuinely hard to argue with once you see the numbers.
This post covers why passwords remain the biggest single risk in most businesses, what a passkey actually is under the hood, what migration realistically looks like, and how to approach it without disrupting your team’s day-to-day workflow.
Why passwords are still the biggest risk
Passwords have had sixty years to prove themselves. The data tells a remarkably consistent story, year after year, regardless of how much security awareness training gets thrown at the problem.
More than 80% of data breaches involve compromised credentials, a figure that has remained essentially unchanged year after year, according to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. The underlying problem hasn’t changed either: passwords are shared secrets that must be stored somewhere, and secrets that get stored eventually get stolen. That’s not a failure of any particular business’s diligence. It’s a structural weakness baked into how passwords work in the first place.
Multi-factor authentication reduced that risk significantly and remains an important baseline for every business we work with. But SMS-based codes, still the most common form of MFA, have a known weakness. Modern phishing kits can intercept a one-time code in real time: a convincing fake login page captures both the password and the code, then uses them on the real site before the session even expires.
Phishing-resistant authentication closes that gap by design, rather than by asking users to be more careful. Passkeys make it technically impossible for a fraudulent page to trigger login on your real device, because the credential is cryptographically bound to the legitimate domain from the moment it’s created.
What a passkey actually is
A passkey is a cryptographic credential. Instead of a shared password stored on a server somewhere, your device creates a matched pair of digital keys the moment you register with a service.
The private key stays on your device and never leaves it, ever. The public key goes to the service. When you log in, your device uses biometrics — Face ID, a fingerprint, or Windows Hello — or a device PIN to sign a cryptographic challenge from the server. The server verifies the signature using the public key. No password is ever transmitted anywhere, at any point in the process.
A passkey can’t be phished, because a fraudulent login page simply can’t trigger authentication on your real device. It can’t be reused, because it’s bound to a specific domain from the start. And it can’t be exposed in a server-side breach, because the private key never exists outside your device in the first place. Passkeys are built on the FIDO2 and WebAuthn open standards, backed jointly by Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The FIDO Alliance reported that more than 15 billion online accounts now support passkey sign-in, double the figure from just the year before.
What passkey migration actually means
Passkey migration is not a single cutover, and anyone promising otherwise is oversimplifying it. It’s a gradual transition that runs passwords and passkeys in parallel until passkeys are established across the accounts and platforms that actually matter most to your business.
A migration plan typically covers three things: which platforms already support passkeys, which users to start with, and what fallback options exist for tools that aren’t yet ready. For most business teams running Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, the infrastructure is already sitting there, largely unused.
Microsoft enabled passkeys through Entra ID and made them the default sign-in for new accounts in May 2025. Google has supported passkeys for Workspace accounts since 2023. For businesses in either ecosystem, passkey migration can begin without buying anything new or waiting on a vendor roadmap.
How to approach migration without disrupting your team
Start where support already exists
Begin with administrators and power users. They reset passwords most often, have the highest-risk access in your environment, and will give you honest feedback on friction before rollout reaches the wider team.
Map your current tools against passkey support before communicating any change to your broader team. Platforms like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, GitHub, Shopify, and most major identity providers already support passkeys fully today. Start with those, and leave anything unsupported for a later phase rather than trying to solve everything at once.
Run passwords and passkeys in parallel
The most common migration mistake we see is treating this as a full cutover on day one. Users can authenticate with passkeys on enrolled devices and fall back to a password on any device not yet enrolled. Running both methods simultaneously gives everyone time for genuine adoption without locking anyone out mid-project, which is the fastest way to turn a good idea into a helpdesk nightmare.
Plan for platforms that aren’t ready yet
Not every tool supports passkeys today, and that’s fine. For those, a password manager generating unique credentials is the right bridge in the meantime. It eliminates the password reuse risk right now, and when those platforms eventually add passkey support, migration becomes a single enrollment step rather than another behavior change your team has to absorb.
The business case beyond security
Security is the primary driver behind most migrations we run. But the operational benefits are real, measurable, and often what actually convinces a skeptical leadership team to commit.
Google reports that passkey sign-ins are four times more successful than password-based logins, with sign-in speeds approximately 20% faster. According to authentication research published by Google, the improvement comes from removing friction entirely. Users no longer mistype passwords, wait for SMS codes to arrive, or trigger account lockouts by trying an outdated credential out of habit.
Fewer failed logins means fewer helpdesk calls and fewer interruptions to everyone’s actual work. NIST’s 2025 update to SP 800-63-4 now requires phishing-resistant authentication as a mandatory option for high-assurance access, which means passkey migration is also becoming a compliance step for businesses working toward those standards, not just a nice-to-have.
Common objections, and why they usually don’t hold up
“Our team isn’t technical enough for this” comes up in nearly every conversation we have about passkeys, and it’s almost always based on a misunderstanding of what enrollment actually involves. Setting up a passkey looks exactly like unlocking a phone: a fingerprint, a face scan, or a PIN someone already uses dozens of times a day. There’s no new concept to learn, no seed phrase to write down, nothing resembling the friction people associate with other security upgrades they’ve dealt with in the past.
“What if someone’s phone breaks or gets replaced” is the next question, and it’s a fair one. Because passkeys sync through a cloud keychain rather than living solely on one device, a lost or replaced phone doesn’t strand anyone the way a lost hardware security key used to. The new device picks up the same passkeys once it’s signed into the same account ecosystem, with standard account recovery available as a backstop if something goes wrong along the way.
“We just rolled out MFA, do we really need to do this too” is the objection we hear from businesses that recently invested real time and money into a security upgrade and are understandably hesitant to layer on another change so soon. The honest answer is that MFA and passkeys aren’t competing projects. Passkeys are simply a stronger, phishing-resistant way of satisfying the same requirement MFA was solving for, and for platforms that already support them, migration is closer to a configuration change than a second rollout.
What a realistic first 90 days looks like
For a business our size in Michiana, a sensible rollout usually starts with mapping which of your existing tools already support passkeys, which for most Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace shops is the majority of what your team touches every day. From there, enrolling your admin accounts first gives you a small, forgiving group to catch any rough edges before the wider rollout.
A short, plain-language walkthrough for the rest of the team — five minutes, not a training module — covers how to enroll a passkey on their phone or laptop, and passwords keep working as a fallback the entire time. By the end of ninety days, most businesses we’ve walked through this have the majority of daily logins running on passkeys, with password resets already down noticeably, and nobody locked out along the way.
From password-dependent to passwordless
The infrastructure to do this is very likely already sitting inside the Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace subscription your business already pays for every month. The gap isn’t technology. It’s simply that nobody’s mapped out the plan yet, which is the exact piece we help with.
Every year this migration gets delayed is another year of reset tickets, another year of a phishing kit somewhere getting slightly better at intercepting SMS codes, and another year of a password policy that, however well-intentioned, is fundamentally fighting a losing battle against how people actually behave. The businesses that move now aren’t reacting to a breach. They’re getting ahead of one, at a moment when the change is still a choice rather than a scramble.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do passkeys work across all devices and platforms?
Most modern devices support passkeys natively: iPhone, Android, Windows, and Mac all include built-in passkey support through iCloud Keychain, Google Password Manager, and Windows Hello. Chrome, Safari, and Edge all support passkey sign-in. Not every app or service has added passkey support yet, but major platforms including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, GitHub, and Apple ID are fully ready today.
What happens if a user loses the device their passkey is stored on?
Passkeys sync across a user’s enrolled devices through their cloud keychain. If a device is lost, the passkey is recoverable on any other device signed into the same account ecosystem. Recovery options are configured during enrollment, and account recovery flows remain available as a fallback.
Does moving to passkeys mean we can turn off MFA entirely?
A passkey is itself a phishing-resistant form of strong authentication, so it effectively replaces the need for a separate MFA step on that account. Platforms not yet enrolled in passkeys should keep standard MFA enabled as a fallback during the transition period.
How long does a full passkey migration usually take?
Most small businesses can get the majority of daily-use platforms enrolled within 60 to 90 days, running passwords and passkeys in parallel throughout. Full migration across every tool, including ones without current passkey support, is an ongoing process that continues as vendors add support.
Is passkey migration expensive to set up?
For most businesses already on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, the capability is included in the subscription you already pay for. The cost is mostly time: mapping your tools, enrolling users, and running a short walkthrough, not new software licenses.
Graham’s Take
Of everything we help clients across South Bend and Goshen roll out, this is one of the rare changes that’s both more secure and genuinely easier for your team to use day to day. Most owners assume “more secure” automatically means “more friction,” and passkeys are one of the few places that trade-off doesn’t actually apply. If you’re already on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, there’s a good chance you’re closer to ready than you think.
