IAM Migration
An IAM migration moves identities, accounts, entitlements, policies, and integrations from an existing identity platform or model to another one.
- Synonym
- identity platform migration
Definition
An IAM migration is not only a technical platform change. It can involve identities, accounts, entitlements, roles, policies, connectors, workflows, federated applications, secrets, historical data, authorization models, and the way the whole is operated. Most migrations rely on a period of coexistence between the old and the new system, with progressive transition by population or by application, defined cut-over points, rollback options, data reconciliation, functional validation, and finally the decommissioning of the legacy platform. The migration plan should state, for each perimeter, what is migrated as is, what is redesigned on the way, and what is deliberately left behind.
Why it matters
An IAM migration touches authentication and entitlements for real users, so its failure modes are business interruptions, not only technical incidents.
The Ariovis perspective
The main risk of an IAM migration is not only that the new platform fails to work. It is that a user loses a necessary access, keeps an access that should have disappeared, that an application can no longer authenticate its users, or that a business process is interrupted. An IAM migration therefore has to be designed in terms of business continuity as much as technology, and big-bang cut-overs are worth avoiding whenever the context allows a controlled transition.
Related services
Common pitfalls
- Treating a migration as a purely technical move ignores the business risk of a user losing a needed access or keeping one that should have disappeared.
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