Which copy of the file is the real one?

A Register dinner in Soho on 20 October takes on the file infrastructure everyone still runs and nobody chose, off the record.

EVENT: Somewhere in your organisation right now, somebody is trying to work out which of four copies of a file is the current one. They will probably get it right, after twenty minutes and a message to a colleague in another time zone, and nobody will log the twenty minutes.

That is what it costs to run distributed teams on file infrastructure built for an office, and most organisations have stopped noticing. The NAS is still there. So is the VPN, and so is the habit of downloading a file to work on it and syncing it back later, which arrived with the first remote worker and never left. None of it fails outright. The bill turns up somewhere else, as duplicated storage, as time spent waiting, and as a security review that finds one file in three places with three different sets of permissions.

The Register is putting that problem to a dinner in Soho on Tuesday 20 October. Joe Fay of The Register chairs. Rupert Watson, VP GTM for EMEA at LucidLink, joins the conversation. It runs under the Chatham House Rule, so what is said can be used and who said it cannot, and the chair’s job includes stopping anyone who starts to pitch.

What makes an evening like this useful is the detail people only share in private. The workaround a team adopted the week the office emptied and has been paying for ever since, for instance, and what they did about it once somebody added up the cost. Nobody says that on a recorded webinar.

The questions for the table: how organisations are handling the growth in unstructured data, how they support distributed teams without paying for the same file three times, what they are doing about sync and version control, and whether any of it holds up in a security incident. Nobody is proposing to rip the estate out. The evening is about modernising around the storage and governance investments already made.

The table is for senior technology, infrastructure and data leaders carrying this now. Dinner runs from 6.30pm to 9pm at The Soho Hotel. Places are limited and go by invitation.