If Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) is still synchronising identities, provisioning accounts, or managing smartcards in your environment in 2026, a decision can no longer be postponed. And because every MIM environment is different, the right answer for your organisation will not be the same as for anyone else.
Microsoft has extended support for MIM 2016 until 9 January 2029. That extension is a gift, not a reason to wait. From today, there are roughly 33 months left – and identity migrations of any real complexity typically take between 12 and 36 months.
January 2029 attracts most of the attention, but the platform MIM depends on is evolving more quickly than that single date suggests.
The list of supported platforms has already changed. To remain supported between now and 2029, a MIM environment must run on:
At the same time, several related components are already being phased out:
If your MIM setup still relies on any of these, at least one important deadline has already passed.
Microsoft’s strategic investment is clearly in Microsoft Entra ID Governance: Lifecycle Workflows, Access Packages, Access Reviews, and Privileged Identity Management. For many MIM scenarios, this is the natural destination.
However, “many” does not mean “all”. Some MIM capabilities still lack straightforward cloud equivalents:
In these cases, the right approach is rarely a simple lift to the cloud. More often, it is hybrid – Entra ID Governance where it fits, a modernised and supported MIM platform where it does not, and a controlled retirement of each component as cloud‑native alternatives mature.
After two decades of FIM and MIM work across the Nordics, I have yet to encounter two identical environments. The number of variables is simply too high:
Migration plans that ignore these factors tend to fail in the worst possible way: late, in production, and after significant sunk cost. What is right for one organisation can be entirely wrong for another.
This is why we created the Half‑Day MIM Transition Workshop. It is intentionally light in calendar impact, but concrete in outcome.
Together with your IT, identity, and security stakeholders, we assess:
You leave with a fact‑based decision, a tailored transition path, and a roadmap that your engineering and security teams can realistically execute.
No templates. No vendor pitch disguised as advice. Your environment, your constraints, your plan.
If you are running MIM in 2026, the question is no longer whether to transition. It is whether you do it on your own timeline or the platform’s. Leave with a 2029 plan that fits your environment – not someone else’s.