IBM has patented a technique to allow users to dynamically choose or change the location where public and private cloud data is stored.This is clearly a very important development in legitimizing cloud use for production applications, where country and industry regulators can take a very strong view on the geographies in which data, particularly customer data, can be stored.

Potentially this could have a major impact on the rate of hybrid cloud adoption in highly regulated industries such as financial services, utilities, and the government sector.

The technique allows companies to mark or tag their data and use an intelligent cloud management system to store files in the appropriate location. For example, if a business needs to ensure that all of its financial data is stored in a specific cloud data center, the associated files are tagged appropriately and the cloud management system ensures that the files are stored in the correct location(s).