Which copy of that file is the real one? Dinner, off the record, in Midtown

Joe Fay chairs a Register dinner in New York on the file infrastructure nobody has got around to replacing, with nothing on the record.

EVENT: The Register is hosting a private dinner in New York on Tuesday 27 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 leaves the table.

Distributed teams are producing more unstructured file data than ever, and most of them reach it through infrastructure designed for an office: legacy NAS, a VPN, and a sync-and-download habit nobody actually chose. It rarely fails outright. It charges rent somewhere else instead, in duplicated storage, in waiting, in governance gaps, and in the hour somebody loses working out which version of a file is current.

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 now. 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 modernizing around the storage and governance investments an organization already has, rather than pretending they are not there, which is usually the point at which these conversations stop being useful to the people who have to pay for them.

On the table: handling the growth in unstructured data, supporting distributed teams without paying for the same file three times, sync and version control, and whether any of it holds up against a security incident.

Holly Bossert, Commercial Sales US 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 6.00pm to 8.30pm at The Capital Grille, 120 W 51st Street. Places are limited and go by invitation.