Yesterday I visited the European Cloud Summit to deliver a session on designing an IAM Strategy for Entra ID, Azure & Azure DevOps for engineering teams. No better time than during the train ride back, to look back on the event.

First of all, for those looking for the slides, you can find them here: Henry Been – Securing access to your Azure environments

This session is different than other sessions I’ve given at conferences, as it focuses less on technology, but more on how I’ve applied that technology in a design. In my personal experience, when visiting conferences, there is much attention for new product features, releases or new cool Azure capabilities. Unfortunately, I’ve seen fewer attention for stories about how these technologies were used by companies and what their experiences where. Personally, I would love to see more sessions focus on this: real world use cases and experiences.

This was the third time I gave this session and three times I’ve gotten positive feedback on the idea of a session that focus more on design and how to apply a technology. So I think my ask to conference organizers and conference speakers would be to consider adding more sessions like this to the program. I would love to learn from the experiences of others!

Next to my own session I’ve spent a few hours walking the grounds and meeting lots of people. For me, the opportunity to meet other professionals and exchange ideas and stories is just as valuable as sessions, sometimes even more valuable. One of the reasons I keep visiting conferences and not just get all my information online.

If you have thoughts on conferences focusing more on real world stories and not just on 101’s into new technologies, please share them! I’d love to hear your thoughts!