How many times are you paying for the same file?

EVENT: Count the copies. The one on the NAS. The one somebody pulled over the VPN to work on at home. The one in the sync folder, which may or may not still match the one on the NAS. The one attached to an email because the sync was slow that morning. Four copies of one file, four places paying to store it, and one person, eventually, working out which is current. That is the cost most organizations have stopped noticing. Distributed teams produce more unstructured file data than ever, and most of them reach it through infrastructure designed for an office. It rarely fails outright. The bill turns up somewhere else, as duplicated storage and time spent waiting, and as a security review that finds one file in three places with three different sets of permissions. That is the problem The Register is putting to a dinner in New York on Tuesday 27 October. …