A customer identity migration can look simple right up until you trace what happens after someone enters a password. An application expects a particular claim. A second system owns profile changes. Account recovery follows a path nobody has tested in years. The visible sign-in page is only one link in a longer chain.

Those details matter because customers experience the whole chain, not the identity diagram. If a login succeeds but the application cannot authorize the customer, the journey is still broken. If account recovery fails, the help desk inherits the problem.

Microsoft Entra External ID gives organizations a customer identity and access management platform for apps used by consumers and business customers. Microsoft describes the model in its External ID overview. Moving from Azure AD B2C is an opportunity to make the identity architecture easier to understand and operate, not a reason to reproduce every legacy policy as-is.

Microsoft’s services and integration partners page helps organizations find advisory, implementation, and engineering support for migration. It also points to Microsoft’s migration guidance and encourages customers to engage their Microsoft account team.

This is more than a new line on a web page. Microsoft’s directory is where organizations are told to look for advisory, implementation, and engineering support. By adding Fortytwo, Microsoft is putting us among the partners customers can turn to for one of the most sensitive platform transitions they will make: moving the identity journeys their customers depend on.

Fortytwo is the only Nordic-originated organization in the directory. That is a milestone for our team and for the Nordic identity community. For customers, it means Microsoft recognizes a partner rooted in this region, ready to help protect customer identities while modernizing how applications sign people in.

Before choosing a migration pattern, map the actual journeys: registration, sign-in, account recovery, profile changes, and any identity-provider handoffs. Trace what each application sends to and expects from the identity service. Include the custom policies, claims, API calls, and dependencies that might not appear in the original project documentation.

This assessment is not an exercise in copying configuration. It helps teams decide what to keep, what to redesign, and what to retire. A stale flow that nobody needs should not become a new requirement just because it exists in the old tenant.

The result should be a shared picture of the destination: identity model, application changes, ownership, and acceptance tests. That gives engineering, security, product, and support teams a common basis for making decisions before the cutover window is on the calendar.

User accounts and passwords deserve separate decisions. A team may choose a bulk user migration and a planned password reset. If preserving passwords is important, a just-in-time approach may be appropriate, but it introduces questions about coexistence, profile changes, and customers who do not sign in during the migration period.

Microsoft’s migration planning guidance helps teams compare the available approaches before implementation. Its migration guide provides the next level of detail. The right path depends on the current tenant, application architecture, account lifecycle, and the experience you want customers to have.

The migration pattern has to fit the account lifecycle and customer expectations, not just the tenant. Decide what happens to credentials, what coexistence means for profile changes, and how customers who do not sign in during the migration window will get access.

Testing should follow the customer journey all the way through. Verify registration, sign-in, sign-out, recovery, identity-provider failures, and the tokens each application consumes. Test accounts that have not migrated, accounts that need support, and the less common paths that can turn a quiet release into a busy help desk.

Then release in stages where the architecture allows it. Agree on success measures, monitoring, support ownership, and rollback criteria before production changes begin. A successful authentication proves the identity provider accepted a request. It does not prove the application made the right access decision or that the customer can complete their task.

Fortytwo helps teams carry the design through implementation, validation, staged cutover, and post-cutover checks. Your application remains responsible for authorization and data access; the identity service establishes and communicates the authenticated user’s identity.

The migration is a milestone, not the finish line. The destination needs configuration, security controls, monitoring, changes, and operational ownership. Some organizations want to run that work themselves. Others want their product teams focused on the service they are building, with identity specialists looking after the tenant and its day-to-day operation.

Fortytwo’s Managed Microsoft Entra External ID service covers tenant setup and configuration, branded sign-up and sign-in experiences, supported authentication options, security configuration, monitoring, ongoing management, and professional support. It gives teams a way to move from project delivery to an operating model, while Microsoft Entra External ID remains the platform providing customer identity.

Some customer journeys need stronger proof that a person is who they claim to be, such as before they register a new authenticator or recover access. Fortytwo’s CheckID can add electronic identity and payment identity provider integrations where supported. It is an optional part of the journey, not the whole service, and available providers depend on the country and scenario.

Fortytwo’s migration service starts by assessing identity journeys, custom policies, user and credential migration needs, and application integrations. We work with your team to shape the target design and choose an approach for user and credential migration that fits your applications and customers.

Then we support implementation, journey testing, staged cutover, and post-cutover validation. The goal is to keep the engineering and customer-support teams clear on what changes, how success is measured, and what to do if a release needs to pause.

For customers across the Nordics, Microsoft’s global customer identity platform now has a partner rooted in the region. Fortytwo brings more than a single integration to the table: identity architecture, migration engineering, managed operations, and experience shaping customer journeys around regional needs.

Where a journey calls for stronger identity proof, CheckID can connect supported Nordic and European eID and payment identity providers. It is one option in a broader identity practice, not the whole story. The work starts with your customers and applications, then chooses the right combination of Microsoft Entra External ID and Fortytwo services for the journey.

Customer identity is also changing beyond sign-in. The European Digital Identity Wallet is designed to let people use digital identity and other credentials with public and private services across the EU. The European Commission explains the European Digital Identity Wallet and the common framework behind it.

Separately from Managed External ID and CheckID, Fortytwo is developing an EUDI Gateway for wallet-based service journeys that do not fit a standard OpenID Connect sign-in flow. It is distinct from Microsoft’s External ID platform and CheckID. This work looks beyond the sign-in itself: how could a customer use a digital identity wallet to share a trusted credential with a service, instead of creating yet another account?

Whether you are planning a migration, building a new customer identity service, or deciding who will operate it, start with a conversation about the journey your customers need. Book a 30-minute chat, contact Fortytwo, or call +47 45 600 600.