What people say about their file infrastructure once the badge comes off

Joe Fay chairs a Register dinner in Soho on 20 October where infrastructure leaders compare notes on the file estate they inherited, off the record.

Most senior infrastructure people could tell you what they would do with their file estate if they were starting again. Far fewer will tell you what they actually did, because the honest version tends to involve a VPN that was meant to be temporary and a NAS that has outlived two migration plans.

That honest version is what The Register is after at a dinner in Soho on Tuesday 20 October. Joe Fay of The Register chairs, and Rupert Watson, VP for EMEA at LucidLink, is at the table to answer questions. Everyone else is a peer running distributed teams on storage that was bought for an office. The evening runs under the Chatham House Rule, so what is said can travel but the name attached to it stays in the room.

The useful material is the kind nobody puts in a case study: who turned out to still have VPN access months after leaving, say, or which team quietly set up its own sync service because the official route was too slow, and what the security team said when it found out.

The agenda starts where most of those stories end up, with governance and security. How do you keep control of unstructured data once it is spread across offices and home connections, and does the current setup stand up to the threats it now faces? From there the table moves on to cost and performance, including the duplicated storage that piles up when every team keeps its own copy, and to what all of it does for the people who simply need the right file.

It is one table and places are limited. Drinks start at 6.30pm at The Soho Hotel on Tuesday 20 October, followed by dinner, with the evening finishing at 9pm. Places go by invitation.