Towards dependably detecting geolocation of cloud servers

Abstract

Every physical data center is located somewhere on the globe. A cloud service can be delivered from a set of data centers in several locations, depending on their workload situation. Responsibilities of the service provider include ensuring that legal and agreed constraints are respected also by its subcontractors, for example, those providing cloud computing resources. Several countries have data protection legislation that restrict sharing copies of sensitive data to locations that do not have compliant legislation. This paper presents ideas to dependably detect location specific information, like the legislation properties, of the current physical host server executing a service.