Diary of an EIC2022 passenger – Day 1

Follow André Koot as he attends EIC2022 in this miniseries called ‘diary of an EIC22 passenger’. First-hand accounts, observations, reporting, and pictures. Starting off with: Day 1 of EIC22.

Dear diary,

Day 1 of KuppingerCole’s European Identity and Cloud Conference in Berlin

Berlin, that’s a change. It may not be much, but it’s a different experience. The first 14 years the event location was in Munich, in Bavaria. I can remember the first location, the national museum. I gave a duo presentation with an expert in the field, and it was horrible, my first English language presentation, discussing cloud and service oriented architectures. Great to forget… And then later the event moved to another location in Munich. Well, in fact in the Munich region, it took 40 mintes by train and a 10 minute walk. Different now, the Berlin Congress Center is in the city center and most hotels are around the corner. With plenty amusement around. Great move!

Second change… seeing old friends again after more than 2 years. And meeting people we only ever met online during the last years, and whom we never met in real life. We certainly missed that and so it was great meeting all these great people.

The first day is the day to set the scene. Where are we now, what are the current, most pressing issues in identity and access, and what are the trends that we should investigate. I missed out on the pre-conf workshops. But I did visit the conference market place, visited a few business relations and met some old friends. No time wasted.

And after lunch, the keynotes took place. Setting the scene, first by Martin Kuppinger, the co-founder of KuppingerCole. One of the themes definitely was adaptation, adapting to changing worlds. In his view companies need to adapt, to be flexible to counter all digital challenges. And to be able to adapt, companies need to be ‘composable’, be able to add, change or remove parts, change on demand. Interesting wording, composable. Someone found out that autocorrect changed that to compostable. Never mind. In the next CISO panel session, the ciso’s understood what was required, but they all had different definitions and titles for the adaptation mode. The term may not stick…

Next speaker, Sebastian Manhart, discussed the topic of decentralized identities. I do relate to that topic, being actively involved in the #fediverse, a disctributed, decentralized, open source social network, offering self-souvereign privacy enabling identities. Strange that my peers are not active in that same circle. Perhaps they will follow me later…

Another topic I care about and that we too embrace, is Zero Trust. Gal Helemski from PlainID gave a clear view to simplify the topic.

I do not fully agree with all that Gal says, see my tweet and photo: https://twitter.com/meneer/status/1524028767018049539?s=20&t=TrSoVjn1C5v0ECkxA8aiXw (and for clarity sake, let me point to my blog post, explaining the difference in view (but still using the same solution!)

The other topic of interest is privacy. Not just the legal obligations to assure privacy, but more in fundamental explanations. First Max Schrems (the man who took down the privacy shield and facebook), pointing to the conflicting US FISA laws (bringing back memories of the late Caspar Bowden – plenty of his presentations about on YouTube) and then came the unstoppable Emilio Mordini. When the video is available online, I will inform you all, it’s a must-see presentation.

And then there is the wallet thing. Wallets containing you digital identity, credentials and attributes. Jacoba Sieders explained the EU initiatives in that area, and Joni Brennan the Canadian view. We’re on to something…

Later keynotes were great, prominent speakers Vittorio Bertucci and Mike Kiser had entertaining talks about privacy and face recognition. I love there views, not just for the laughs, but they manage to make complex matter seem logical, they not how to explain hard stuff. Try to find their video’s later!

And then, of course, we cannot forget to give a tribute to the great Kim Cameron and to his magnum opus, the 7 Laws of Identity. And he will not be forgotten as the Identity Guru, but also als the nice person and familyman that he was.

Day 2, some more keynotes and then all break-out sessions. I will report later!