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.
On Tuesday, 27 October, The Register hosted a private dinner in New York for senior technology, infrastructure, and data leaders. The event was conducted under the Chatham House Rule, ensuring that nothing discussed would leave the table. With the rise of distributed teams, unstructured file data has surged, often managed through legacy infrastructure like NAS, VPNs, and sync-and-download habits that users didn't actively choose.
This practice leads to wasted resources, unnecessary storage, governance issues, and confusion over which version of a file is current.
The real issue at hand was not the architecture diagram but rather the informal workarounds teams have been quietly paying for. Participants pondered what went wrong when they attempted to retire their NAS systems and how they would approach the situation differently now.
The dinner conversation focused on modernizing existing storage and governance investments instead of disregarding them. The event aimed to find solutions that leverage an organization's current resources rather than ignoring them, as these discussions were usually futile when participants had to bear the cost. The table was set for an open discussion on handling the growth of unstructured data, supporting distributed teams without duplicating files, sync and version control, and maintaining security during incidents.
Holly Bossert, Commercial Sales US at LucidLink, joined the conversation, moderated by Joe Fay of The Register. Dinner lasted from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM at The Capital Grille, 120 W 51st Street, with limited seats available by invitation.
Written by urgent.news from The Register Science's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
