Your files are in four places and nobody knows which one is right

Joe Fay chairs a Register dinner on the file infrastructure nobody has got round to replacing, under the Chatham House Rule.

EVENT: The Register is hosting a private dinner in Soho on Tuesday 20 October for senior technology, infrastructure and data leaders, with LucidLink. Joe Fay takes the chair, it runs under the Chatham House Rule, and nothing said is on the record.

The problem on the table is the one most organisations have stopped saying out loud. Unstructured file data keeps growing, distributed teams keep needing to reach it, and the infrastructure underneath is still legacy NAS, a VPN and a sync-and-download habit nobody actually chose. It rarely fails outright. It just charges rent somewhere else: in duplicated storage, in waiting, in governance gaps, and in the hour somebody loses working out which copy of a file is the current one.

The conversation worth having about that is not the architecture diagram. It is what a team did when it stopped being in one building. Which workaround somebody has quietly been paying for ever since. What broke when they tried to retire the NAS, and what they would do differently. People say that over dinner. They do not say it on a recorded webinar.

So this is dinner. Drinks, a handful of questions across the table, then more drinks. Everyone there as a peer, and a chair whose job includes stopping anyone who starts to pitch.

The premise is deliberately not rip and replace. The evening is about modernising around the storage and governance investments an organisation already has, rather than pretending they are not there, which is usually the point at which these conversations stop being useful to anyone who has to pay for them.

On 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 do about sync and version control, and whether any of it holds up against a security incident.

Rupert Watson, VP GTM for EMEA at LucidLink, joins the conversation. Joe Fay of The Register moderates.

The table is for senior technology, infrastructure and data leaders carrying this now, not planning for it later. Dinner runs from 6.30pm to 9.00pm at The Soho Hotel, 4 Richmond Mews. Places are limited and go by invitation.