Okta Passkeys: Product Strategy and Passkey Capabilities

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Okta has grown from a cloud‑first identity pioneer into one of the market’s most influential platforms. With the acquisition of Auth0, Okta now operates two distinct clouds - the Workforce Identity Cloud (WIC) and the Customer Identity Cloud (CIC) - that shape how passkeys and passwordless are implemented.

This analysis tackles five practical questions:

1. What is the current Okta product landscape and how did it evolve?
2. How do WIC and CIC differ in their approach to passkeys and passwordless?
3. What role does the Okta Identity Engine (OIE) play across policies, device assurance and developer APIs?
4. Where are the strengths, gaps and trade‑offs for adoption, recovery and governance?
5. What should organizations do next and when is a passkey adoption platform like Corbado helpful?

For broader context and structure, see our related deep dives:

• Ping Identity: Product Strategy and Passkey Capabilities
• ForgeRock: Product Evolution and Passkey Capabilities

To comprehend Okta's current market offerings and its strategic direction, one must first understand the historical context that shaped its product portfolio. The company's evolution from a cloud-native startup to an industry titan has been marked by strategic growth and, most critically, a series of transformative acquisitions. This history is the key to deciphering Okta's present-day two-cloud structure and its distinct approaches to workforce and customer identity.

Okta's journey began with a clear focus on solving the challenges of identity in a cloud-first world, a vision that has been consistently expanded through targeted acquisitions.

Okta, Inc. was co‑founded in 2009 by Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest, initially incorporated as “SaaSure.” The company became an early leader in IDaaS and went public in 2017 with a valuation above $6B.

The most significant milestone was the acquisition of Auth0 in a ~$6.5B stock transaction—announced in March 2021 and closed in May 2021. From the outset, Okta stated Auth0 would operate as an independent business unit and that both stacks would be supported over time, laying the groundwork for today’s two‑cloud strategy (Okta + Auth0 overview; Oktane22: WIC announcement; CIC for consumer apps).

Following the Auth0 deal, Okta continued to make focused acquisitions (e.g. atSpoke in 2021, Spera in 2023) to deepen governance and identity‑powered security. Current positioning and capabilities are reflected in the quarterly release overview.

The direct result of the Auth0 acquisition is Okta's current go-to-market structure, which is organized around two primary and distinct cloud platforms. This dual-platform model is the most critical concept for understanding Okta's product landscape.

The Okta Workforce Identity Cloud (WIC) is the evolution of Okta's original product suite, designed to secure an organization's internal and extended workforce, including employees, contractors and business partners. It is built upon the foundational Okta Platform and emphasizes centralized admin control and device assurance.

The core mission of WIC is to provide a unified solution for secure access to any resource, from any user, while maintaining the principle of least privilege. Its key components form a comprehensive suite for enterprise IAM:

• Identity & Access Management: Universal Directory, Single Sign-On (SSO), Adaptive MFA and Okta FastPass for passwordless authentication.

• Identity Governance: Lifecycle Management and Access Governance automate onboarding, offboarding and reviews.

• Privileged Access Management (PAM): Okta Privileged Access extends identity-centric controls to critical infrastructure.

• Identity Security & Threat Protection: Identity Security Posture Management and Identity Threat Protection.

WIC is characterized by its focus on IT modernization, centralized administrative control, and its vast ecosystem of over 8,000 pre-built integrations in the Okta Integration Network (OIN), which connects to virtually every major enterprise application and service.

The Okta Customer Identity Cloud (CIC) is the company's solution for CIAM, designed to secure external users of consumer-facing applications, SaaS products and other digital services. It is explicitly “powered by Auth0,” preserving the developer‑first philosophy that made Auth0 a leader.

The core mission of CIC is to enable developers to build secure, seamless and adaptable login experiences that drive user acquisition, retention and loyalty. Its components are engineered for flexibility and ease of use:

• Authentication: Universal Login, passwordless (passkeys, magic links), social login, Adaptive MFA.

• Extensibility: Auth0 Actions provide a serverless environment to customize identity flows.

• Authorization: Fine-Grained Authorization (FGA) for complex permissions.

• Security: Built-in attack protection including bot detection and breached password checks.

CIC's defining characteristic is its developer-centricity. It is built around robust APIs, SDKs for various programming languages and extensive documentation, empowering development teams to integrate identity quickly and focus on their core product rather than the complexities of authentication and authorization.

The dual-platform strategy, while strategically sound, has created a product nomenclature that can be a source of confusion. Clarifying these terms is essential for any meaningful discussion of Okta's capabilities.

The decision to maintain two distinct platforms rather than attempting a full technical merger is a high-stakes strategic choice. It avoids the immense disruption and engineering cost of integrating two complex, mature platforms. More importantly, it reflects a deep understanding of the market. Okta recognizes that the buying center and core requirements for workforce IAM are fundamentally different from those for CIAM. Workforce IAM is typically driven by the CIO and IT department, with priorities centered on security, compliance, and operational efficiency. CIAM, on the other hand, is often driven by product and development teams, with priorities focused on user experience, conversion rates and time-to-market. A single, unified platform would inevitably have to make compromises that would diminish its appeal to one or both of these distinct audiences. By maintaining separate, specialized platforms, Okta is pursuing a strategy of total market capture, aiming to be the best-in-class solution for both the IT administrator and the application developer, even at the cost of some brand complexity.

• Platform vs. Cloud: The most important distinction is between the underlying technology and the go-to-market brand.

  • The Okta Platform is the technology stack that underpins the Workforce Identity Cloud (WIC). When discussing products like Okta Identity Governance or Privileged Access, one is referring to components of the Okta Platform, which are sold as part of WIC.7

  • The Auth0 Platform is the technology stack that underpins the Customer Identity Cloud (CIC). When discussing products like Auth0 Actions or Universal Login, one is referring to components of the Auth0 Platform, which are sold as part of CIC.

• A Note on "Okta Customer Identity": Adding to the potential for confusion, Okta's product lists sometimes include a product named "Okta Customer Identity" as part of the Okta Platform. This refers to the legacy CIAM solution that was built on the original Okta platform before the Auth0 acquisition and now runs on the Okta Identity Engine (OIE). While it is no longer sold to new customers, it remains supported and is still widely deployed in production across many enterprises. New feature development and primary investment for net‑new CIAM use cases are centered on the Auth0‑powered Customer Identity Cloud. If you are evaluating Okta for a new CIAM project, focus on CIC. If you are an existing OIE‑based Okta Customer Identity tenant, this article highlights how you can adopt passkeys without re‑platforming and keep your current stack in place (see the section How Corbado can help for details).

The industry's move toward a passwordless future is a direct response to the systemic failures of password-based security. Passwords are a weak link, vulnerable to phishing, credential stuffing and reuse across multiple sites, making them the primary vector in a majority of data breaches. Passkeys are designed to solve these problems at a fundamental, cryptographic level.

Passkeys are a consumer-friendly implementation of open standards developed by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The core technologies are the FIDO2 standards and the Web Authentication (WebAuthn) API. They operate on the principle of public-key cryptography. During registration, a user's device creates a unique pair of cryptographic keys:

• A private key, which is stored securely on the user's device (e.g. in a secure enclave) and never leaves it.

• A public key, which is sent to and stored by the online service.

When the user signs in, the service sends a challenge to the device. The device uses the private key to sign the challenge and the service verifies the signature with the public key. Because the private key is never transmitted, there is no shared secret for an attacker to steal, making the system inherently resistant to phishing.

Within the Customer Identity Cloud, Okta has embraced the mainstream vision of passkeys. The implementation is designed to be as frictionless as possible for developers, aligning with the core CIC goal of optimizing the customer experience to drive business growth.

Passkeys are treated as an optional feature for CIC, aimed at improving user sign-up and sign-in conversion rates. The implementation is simple for developers. In many cases, passkey support can be enabled with a simple toggle in the Auth0 dashboard within a database connection's settings, with the passkey option automatically appearing in the New Universal Login flow. This "flip of a switch" approach minimizes development effort and accelerates time-to-market.

The feature became Generally Available (GA) for all CIC customers in February 2024, following an Early Access period that began in October 2023, indicating a quick path to product maturity. The entire philosophy is geared toward removing barriers. The goal is to combat account abandonment, reduce user frustration with password complexity rules and offer the modern, secure, and seamless experience that consumers increasingly expect from digital services.

In contrast to the CIC approach, the implementation of passkeys in the Workforce Identity Cloud is characterized by caution, control and a security-first mindset. Here, Okta acknowledges the potential risks that the consumer-friendly, synced passkey model introduces into a managed corporate environment.

Instead of being a standalone feature, passkeys are treated as a capability of the existing FIDO2 (WebAuthn) authenticator. This framing is subtle but significant, placing passkeys within a broader context of strong, hardware-backed authentication rather than as a simple password replacement.

The most critical differentiator is a powerful administrative control: the ability to "Block synced Passkeys for FIDO2 (WebAuthn) Authenticators". This feature allows an IT administrator to create a policy that prevents employees from enrolling synced passkeys. The security rationale is clear and directly tied to the principles of Zero Trust architecture. A synced passkey, by its nature, can be used from any device where the user is signed into their personal cloud account (e.g. Apple ID or Google Account). This could include unmanaged, personal devices that do not meet the organization's security posture requirements. Allowing authentication to sensitive corporate resources from such a device would violate the core Zero Trust tenet of "never trust, always verify" both the user and the device. By blocking synced passkeys, an organization can enforce a policy that only permits the use of device-bound credentials, such as those on a corporate-issued Windows laptop with a TPM or a hardware security key (e.g. YubiKey).

For passwordless access from managed corporate devices, Okta heavily promotes its proprietary Okta FastPass solution as the preferred alternative. Okta FastPass provides a phishing-resistant, passwordless experience but also sends rich device context and posture signals back to the Okta platform, allowing for more granular, risk-based access decisions. This is a level of device assurance that synced passkeys, by design, cannot provide.

This implementation reveals that Okta does not view "passkey" as a single, monolithic technology. It recognizes that the term is being interpreted differently based on the context of risk. In the consumer world of CIC, "passkey" is synonymous with convenience, portability and user choice.

In the enterprise world of WIC, the very portability of synced passkeys is identified as a potential security vulnerability that must be managed and controlled. Okta is one of the first major identity vendors to build an explicit administrative tool to reject the mainstream, consumer-friendly form of passkeys in favor of stricter enterprise security controls. This decision is a leading indicator of a broader industry trend: the inevitable collision between user-centric, portable identities and corporate security policies that demand enterprise control. As users become accustomed to seamless authentication with passkeys synced to their personal accounts, they will expect the same convenience for their work applications. Enterprises, however, cannot abdicate their responsibility to secure corporate data and will need tools to enforce their policies. Okta's dual-platform strategy is well positioned to capitalize on this friction, offering a solution for both sides of the divide.

OIE is the policy‑driven control plane behind the Okta Platform that powers WIC and also underpins the legacy OIE‑based Okta Customer Identity used by many CIAM deployments. It orchestrates authenticators, risk signals, device posture and step‑up logic. For developers, OIE increasingly exposes APIs such as the MyAccount WebAuthn API (EA/GA Preview) to build custom, in‑app passkey enrollment experiences without redirecting to settings. Recent notes highlight expanding support (e.g. self‑service EA for Android‑generated passkeys) and planned extensions of “block synced passkeys” from enrollment to authentication via Application Sign‑On Policies.

• Documentation: https://help.okta.com/oie/en-us/content/topics/identity-engine/oie-index.htm
• Release notes (EA): https://help.okta.com/oie/en-us/content/topics/releasenotes/early-access.htm
• Developer notes 2025: https://developer.okta.com/docs/release-notes/2025-okta-identity-engine/

Many organizations still run customer identities directly on OIE (often labeled "Okta Customer Identity"). Although this CIAM path is no longer sold to new customers, it continues to be supported and is materially present in the market.

• OIE provides the FIDO2 (WebAuthn) authenticator and policy controls for end‑user authentication. Similar to WIC, administrators can enforce phishing‑resistant, device‑bound credentials and block synced passkeys where required.
• Compared to CIC, the developer ergonomics, funnel analytics and passkey adoption tooling are very limited for CIAM use cases on OIE. This is where a specialized passkey adoption layer is valuable.
• Existing OIE‑based CIAM tenants can add Corbado to deliver a passkey‑first UX and detailed adoption analytics while keeping Okta as the CIAM system of record. This enables passkeys without re‑platforming or migrating users.

The distinct philosophies governing WIC and CIC manifest in tangible differences in their respective passkey implementations. The following table synthesizes the current capabilities of each platform to provide a clear, side-by-side comparison for technical evaluators.

Table: Passkey Capabilities: Okta Workforce Identity Cloud vs. Customer Identity Cloud

flowchart TD
  %% Origins
  subgraph Origins
    A[2009: Okta founded] --> B["Okta Identity Cloud (Classic Engine)"]
    C[2013: Auth0 founded] --> D[Auth0 Platform]
  end

  %% Engine evolution
  B --> E["2019–2022: Okta Identity Engine (announced 2019 → Early Access late 2020 → default for new orgs Mar 1, 2022)"]

  %% M&A and packaging
  D --> F[May 3, 2021: Okta closes acquisition of Auth0]
  F --> G[Nov 9, 2022: Two clouds launched at Oktane22]

  %% Clouds (product lines)
  G --> H["Workforce Identity Cloud (WIC)"]
  G --> I["Customer Identity Cloud (CIC)"]

  %% Legacy CIAM on OIE
  E --> J["Okta Customer Identity (OIE‑based legacy CIAM — no new sales; still widely deployed)"]

  %% Architectural "powered by" relationships (dashed)
  E -. powers .-> H
  D -. powers .-> I

Okta's public statements and release notes indicate a continued and evolving investment in passwordless technologies across both clouds.

For the Workforce Identity Cloud, the roadmap focuses on expanding support and increasing administrative control. Okta has recently introduced self-service Early Access for passkeys generated by Android devices, moving beyond an initial focus on Apple's ecosystem and broadening the applicability of the feature. A significant development for enhancing the developer experience within the traditionally admin-centric WIC is the new MyAccount WebAuthn API. Currently in Early Access and GA Preview, this API allows organizations to build custom, in-app passkey creation and enrollment experiences, providing a more seamless user journey than redirecting to the standard Okta settings page. Furthermore, Okta plans to enhance its key administrative control by extending the "Block synced Passkeys" feature. Currently, this policy is only applied at the time of enrollment. The roadmap includes plans to apply this restriction during authentication as well, governed by Application Sign-On Policies (ASOP). This would give administrators highly granular, real-time control to, for example, permit a synced passkey for a low-risk application but require a device-bound key for a high-risk one.

For the Customer Identity Cloud, "Passkey and WebAuthn" remain a part for the future roadmap, signaling continued investment in the Auth0 platform's passwordless capabilities to meet the demands of developers building consumer-facing applications.

For OIE‑based Okta Customer Identity (legacy CIAM), the posture is sustain/support rather than net‑new feature investment. Passkeys are available via the OIE FIDO2 authenticator and policy controls. Organizations on this stack that want a modern passkey UX, analytics and adoption tooling typically complement OIE with a specialized passkey layer such as Corbado instead of re‑platforming.

While passkeys represent a major leap forward in security, their implementation is not without challenges and trade-offs that organizations must carefully consider.

The most significant strategic consideration for enterprises is the security implication of synced passkeys. Allowing them in a workforce context (the default behavior in WIC unless explicitly blocked) creates a pathway for corporate resources to be accessed from unmanaged personal devices, which may not meet corporate security and compliance standards. This directly conflicts with the principles of a Zero Trust architecture, which demands verification of device posture.

This challenge is compounded by a critical visibility gap for WIC administrators. The platform currently provides no mechanism to report on which type of passkey a user has enrolled - synced or device-bound. An administrator cannot easily determine the organization's risk exposure from synced passkeys. Okta's own support documentation acknowledges this limitation, going so far as to state, "The best approach is to block Passkeys altogether" if an organization has policies requiring hardware-protected credentials.26 This is a significant admission that highlights the immaturity of the administrative tooling around passkey management.

Another major challenge is the "account recovery black hole" inherent in a truly passwordless system. If a user loses all devices containing their passkey credentials (either the single device for a device-bound key or all devices synced via a cloud account), they are completely locked out. Traditional "forgot password" flows are obsolete. This shifts the burden of recovery to a much higher-stakes process of re-proving a user's identity from scratch. While Okta is introducing components to aid in this, such as the new Temporary Access Code (TAC) authenticator, it does not provide a complete, out-of-the-box business process for identity verification and recovery. This represents a new and complex form of "support debt" for organizations, moving from the high volume of low-cost password resets to a lower volume of extremely high-cost and high-risk identity recovery events.

Finally, it is crucial to recognize that "passwordless" is not a synonym for "invulnerable." Security research into adjacent technologies like Okta FastPass demonstrates that even strong, phishing-resistant systems can have vulnerabilities. The enrollment phase, if not properly secured, can be susceptible to adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) attacks, and misconfigured fallback policies can allow an attacker to downgrade the authentication security level.38 This serves as a critical reminder that the security of any authentication system depends not only on the core technology but also on its rigorous and correct implementation and configuration.

Okta's evolution, marked by the strategic acquisition of Auth0, has resulted in a sophisticated and deliberately two-sided identity ecosystem. The company's approach to passkeys is not a sign of fragmentation but a response to the disparate needs of the workforce and customer identity markets. This dual-pronged strategy, while creating a layer of complexity for prospective customers, is a pragmatic acknowledgment that a single, one-size-fits-all approach to identity—and particularly to the passwordless transition—is untenable. By leveraging Auth0's agility for the developer-driven CIAM market and reinforcing its own platform's strengths in security and control for the IT-led enterprise market, Okta is positioning itself to lead on both fronts.

The analysis concludes that Okta's passkey strategy is a microcosm of its broader two-cloud philosophy.

• In the Customer Identity Cloud, passkeys are a tool for business enablement. The focus is on ease of implementation and offering passkeys is a feature to users who are willing to adopt. Security is a core benefit, but it is delivered in a way that serves the primary goal of a seamless customer journey.

• In the Workforce Identity Cloud, passkeys are a tool for risk management. The focus is on administrative control, policy enforcement and alignment with Zero Trust security principles. User experience is a consideration, but it is secondary to the non-negotiable requirement of securing corporate assets.

This duality reflects the reality of the modern identity landscape. The security requirements, user expectations and technical decision-makers for a consumer-facing mobile banking app are fundamentally different from those for an internal system that grants access to sensitive financial data. Okta's strategy is to provide a best-in-class solution for both scenarios.

Organizations evaluating Okta must first clearly identify their primary use case and align themselves with the appropriate cloud platform. The following recommendations are tailored to each path.

• If you use CIC (new or migrated CIAM): Offer Passkeys early on. The simple, toggle-based implementation in CIC should be leveraged as a competitive advantage. Promote passkeys to users to improve security, reduce login friction and potentially increase sign-up and sign-in conversion rates.

• Plan for the long Tail: Universal passkey adoption will not happen overnight. It is critical to use Auth0's extensibility features, such as Actions, to build graceful authentication flows. These flows must intelligently detect when a user's device or browser does not support passkeys and seamlessly offer alternative authentication methods, such as email-based magic links or one-time codes, to prevent user drop-off.

• Solve for Account Recovery first: The single greatest challenge in a passwordless CIAM implementation is account recovery. Before a public rollout of passkeys, a robust, secure and user-friendly process must be designed for users who lose access to all their devices. This is a critical business process that may involve integration with support teams or third-party identity verification services and should not be treated as a purely technical feature.

• If you run OIE‑based Okta Customer Identity (legacy CIAM): Keep the stack, add passkeys via Corbado. Many enterprises still operate CIAM directly on OIE. You can introduce a passkey‑first experience and analytics with Corbado while keeping Okta as the CIAM system of record. This avoids risky migrations and preserves existing policies and integrations.

• Define your Stance on synced Passkeys: The first and most critical decision for any WIC deployment is whether to allow or block synced passkeys. This decision must be based on the organization's risk tolerance, device management strategy and compliance requirements. For organizations with a mature Zero Trust program and a fleet of managed devices, blocking synced passkeys via the administrative control is the recommended posture to prevent access from unvetted personal devices.

• Prioritize Okta FastPass for managed Devices: For the corporate-managed device fleet (laptops and mobile devices), Okta FastPass should be positioned as the primary passwordless, phishing-resistant experience. It offers a user experience comparable to passkeys while providing superior device context and posture signals that can be used to enforce granular, risk-based access policies - a capability that synced passkeys cannot offer.

• Use FIDO2/Passkeys for High-Assurance Use Cases: The FIDO2 (WebAuthn) authenticator, with synced passkeys explicitly blocked, should be reserved for specific high-assurance and high-risk scenarios. This includes access for privileged administrators to critical infrastructure (e.g. cloud consoles, production servers) or for users who require the highest level of security, often mandated by compliance. In these cases, the use of certified, device-bound hardware security keys should be enforced through Okta's authentication policies.

Adopting passkeys in Okta CIC still leaves a business challenge: turning on passkeys is easy, but achieving high, measurable adoption with safe recovery and clear ROI is hard. Corbado is focused exclusively on Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) - not workforce IAM - and adds an adoption-and-operations layer on top of Okta CIC and on top of OIE‑based Okta Customer Identity (legacy CIAM) without re‑platforming or migrating users.

• High adoption, proven: passkey‑first UX and targeted prompts routinely drive 80%+ passkey uptake, whereas generic native implementations often see only 5–10% adoption. Corbado provides full funnel analytics and cohort views to continuously optimize enrollment and usage.
• Faster time to value in enterprise scenarios: pre‑built UI components and SDKs cut passkey rollout from 12–36 months to 1–3 months.
• Measurable ROI: up to 90% reduction in SMS OTP costs and 30–50% lower support costs as passkeys replace passwords and MFA resets.
• Insights and observability: advanced dashboards provide end‑to‑end login funnel, passkey KPIs and operational telemetry—capabilities that most native IdPs do not offer out of the box.

Integration with Okta CIC follows this model: connect Corbado, configure your application with the pre‑built components, roll out passkeys, track adoption and iterate - no user migration required.

For organizations running OIE‑based Okta Customer Identity, the integration model is similar: keep Okta as the CIAM authority, connect Corbado using standard identity protocols and policies, introduce passkeys with Corbado’s components and analytics, and iterate - again, with no user migration and minimal architectural change.

Okta’s two‑cloud strategy is clear: CIC focuses on developer ergonomics and conversion, while WIC prioritizes device assurance and policy control. In practice, CIC’s native passkeys are easy to toggle on but adoption is often low and CIC does not provide the insights, observability and operational tooling needed to launch passkeys at scale or to prove measurable ROI. By pairing Okta CIC with Corbado, organizations routinely achieve +80% adoption, accelerate time‑to‑market from months/years to weeks and gain the analytics required to manage and optimize the rollout over time, while keeping Okta as the CIAM system of record. The same is true for organizations running OIE‑based Okta Customer Identity: you can add Corbado to enable passkeys and analytics without re‑platforming or migrating users. Corbado is CIAM‑only and complements CIC and OIE‑based Customer Identity. For workforce scenarios, organizations should continue to use Okta’s WIC controls and FastPass.