EMC may have potentially solved one of the biggest obstacles to the adoption of the cloud among customers as it develops a solution to track and verify the location of virtual machines in cloud networks.

Chad Sakac, vice president of EMC's VMware technology alliance, said that customers are seeking guarantees that VMs with sensitive data remain within the country due to the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). For clouds provider like Terremark, which has data center operations located in multiple continents and uses live migration technology to move virtual machines from one country to another, this is an issue.

"Right now, there's nothing that provides any verifiability of where a virtual machine lives... There's nothing stopping you from moving a VM from one place in the world to somewhere else, and more importantly, there's no way to audit that at any sort of scale," Sakac said.

The company, which will be part of VMWorld in San Francisco, is expected to preview technology that combines its RSA security tools with VMware virtualization software and Intel's hardware-based security features "to ensure isolation of regulated workloads and hardware root of trust."

The solution could be used to prevent the movement of VMs automatically from one location to another so it would not violate FISMA's rules. Sakac says that his company's customers have sent "mixed feedback" on whether they want that process to happen automatically, or if they want more manual control.

Sakac, who describes the solution as "geolocation" because it will keep virtual machines within specific geographic boundaries, said that the technology might be available sometime early next year.