Centralised passkey management creates a single operational view for issuing, updating, and revoking credentials, which improves consistency and reduces administrative overhead. Separate identity systems usually fragment ownership, slow down change management, and make phishing-resistant authentication harder to deploy uniformly. The difference is mainly governance maturity: one model treats credentials as an enterprise control, the other as isolated system data.
Why Centralised Passkey Governance Changes the Operational Model
Centralised passkey management turns passkeys into a governed enterprise capability rather than a collection of local enrolments. That matters because passkeys are not just login convenience, they are the authentication layer that determines how consistently an organisation can issue, update, revoke, and audit access. Central control usually improves standardisation, policy enforcement, and exception handling across teams and systems.
The practical difference shows up in ownership. When one system manages the lifecycle, teams can apply uniform enrolment rules, device checks, recovery processes, and revocation logic. When passkeys remain inside separate identity systems, each system tends to invent its own operational model, which increases drift and makes it harder to prove that the same authentication standard is being applied everywhere. For identity governance, that is often the real trade-off, not the credential format itself.
Centralised management also supports faster response when a user changes device, loses access, or leaves the organisation. A single control point can reduce the chance that one stale passkey survives in a forgotten system or that recovery rules differ by application. That consistency matters most where authentication is expected to be phishing-resistant and auditable at scale, as described in the NIST SP 800-63 Digital Identity Guidelines.
Why Separate Identity Systems Fragment Security and Change Management
Leaving passkeys in separate identity systems usually creates fragmented governance. Each system may support passkeys well enough on its own, but the organisation loses a single operational view of enrollment status, policy consistency, and revocation completeness. That fragmentation increases administrative overhead because teams have to reconcile multiple identity repositories, multiple recovery paths, and multiple audit trails.
The security downside is uneven deployment. If some systems enforce strong passkey policies while others lag behind, attackers and insiders can gravitate toward the weakest path. This is especially problematic when authentication controls are meant to reduce phishing exposure across the estate, because the organisation then inherits a mixed environment where assurance depends on where the user signs in. Broad guidance from the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 is useful here as a governance analogue: once credentials are managed as isolated assets, visibility, rotation, and ownership become harder to sustain uniformly.
Separate systems also slow down lifecycle change. Revocation, recovery, and re-enrollment can become application-specific projects instead of routine administrative actions. That matters in real operations because the longer those flows take, the more likely teams are to keep exceptions open, duplicate accounts, or defer cleanup. A passkey strategy is only as strong as its weakest exception path.
What Practitioners Should Look for Before Choosing Either Model
If the organisation has many applications, shared users, or a need for consistent phishing-resistant authentication, centralised management usually wins on governance and auditability. If a business unit truly needs autonomy, the burden shifts to proving that local systems can still enforce the same lifecycle controls, recovery discipline, and reporting quality as the central model. The question is not whether separate systems can work, but whether they can be operated without policy drift.
What to verify: confirm who owns enrolment, recovery, and revocation for every system that stores or brokers passkeys. If no single team can answer where a passkey is active, how it is removed, and how exceptions are reviewed, the environment is already operating with fragmented control.
Decision rule: if the same employee or application can have passkeys in multiple identity systems, treat centralisation as the safer default unless there is a documented isolation requirement. The more distributed the model, the more important it becomes to measure policy consistency, revocation latency, and audit completeness.
Practitioner takeaway: central passkey governance is mainly a control and lifecycle question, not a product preference; choose the model that gives you the clearest ownership, the fastest revocation, and the most consistent enforcement across the full identity estate.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
NIST SP 800-63, CIS Controls v8 and NIST CSF 2.0 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST SP 800-63 | Digital Identity Guidelines — Digital Identity Guidelines | Passkeys are an authentication and authenticator-management subject. |
| Recommendation — Use phishing-resistant authenticator guidance to standardise enrolment, recovery, and revocation across systems. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | 5 — Account Management | Central passkey governance depends on consistent lifecycle control across accounts. |
| 6 — Access Control Management | The core difference is whether access decisions are centrally enforced or fragmented. | |
| Recommendation — Centralise account lifecycle controls so enrolment and revocation stay consistent across applications. Consolidate access control decisions to reduce drift between separate identity systems. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA — Identity Management, Authentication and Access Control | The question compares two operating models for authentication governance. |
| GV.OC — Organizational Context | Choosing central versus separate identity systems is a governance and operating-model decision. | |
| Recommendation — Align authentication governance so passkey policy, recovery, and revocation are managed consistently. Define the operating model and ownership boundaries before distributing passkey management. | ||
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- What is the difference between using separate identity projects and using a shared session proxy across domains?
- What is the difference between patching a vulnerability and reducing identity blast radius?
- What is the difference between managing human accounts and non-human identities?
- What is the difference between managing certificates separately and managing them as identity assets?
