Last year, December 1-2, 2021, I attended the HIP Global conference.
Things being what they are, this conference was hosted virtually. I admire the speakers for still being able to deliver a lot of awesome sessions, on a variety of interesting topics, all connected to identity. Please head over to the Hybrid Identity Protection conference webpage. Here you can also find all prior conference talks at their Discover page. Alternatively, most HIP sessions can be found on Youtube, by following the link below.
NOTE!
To access the material on the HIP conference page you will have to sign up with BrightTALK to gain access. This may be not a bad thing…
A great big thanks to Semperis for being the sponsor of the conference.
A little plug; on their Semperis Youtube channel you will find a great amount of awesome video content, including videos from prior HIP conferences.
Unsurprisingly I got into this conference because of my long-standing admiration of John Craddock. Having attended a pre-conference class with him in the early days of NIC (Nordic Infrastructure Conference), and prior to that multiple TechEd (old Ignite) sessions, he has become a must-see to me (I see that he is scheduled to host a pre-conference session at this years NIC, May 31!).
John did not disappoint on this edition of HIP either and his closing keynote presentation: Will Decentralized Identities and Verifiable Credentials Become the Future of Identity? hit home for me. As a blockchain enthusiast I was delighted to be updated on how ledger technology on blockchain works today, and how it may be of use in the future. I should also note that using ledgers for storing verifiable credentials does not have to include neither Bitcoin nor blockchain as a whole. However, with my area of specialty being identity, considering how identities may be handled in the future is truly intriguing.
As the conference was on an Eastern Time schedule I wasn’t able to check out any of the sessions live. In fact, it took me a couple of weeks before I really got into the sessions but from there it didn’t take long before I had viewed them all, with the exception of one or two.
The first session I watched was Sander Berkouwer’s Windows Hello for Business Hybrid Access: How Does It Work Under the Covers? as I was currently troubleshooting a project having issues with WHfB. The session was very enlightening, both from a theoretical and practical perspective. Getting access to real-life experience from seasoned IT veterans is incredibly valuable.
In the same vain, Joe Kaplan’s Taking a Large Organization Passwordless: Completing the Journey, a follow-up from last years Taking a Large Organization Passwordless, was a good insight into how a big company like Accenture (currently employs more than 650.000 people) thinks and acts when it comes to passwordless.
I also earned a HIP Certificate of completion, so I’d better parade that here, now that I have the chance 
So much good content, and don’t let yourself be fooled by som of the session titles, they don’t all look that exciting. Personally I was always happy I had chimed in to the various sessions, because there were always topics being discussed, or show-cased, that I learned a thing or two from.
Happy HIP-ing! 