Which copy of the file is the real one?

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. …