Bob Muglia briefly touched on Microsoft's desire to help customers through compliance and regulatory issues in his TechEd keynote, but it's what he didn't say that really matters. Microsoft may be working on a solution to make it easy.

Currently, the company's patterns and practice group consults with developers about how to build their applications correctly, and Microsoft uses regional datacenters to help navigate through differences in international laws and regulations. It is also educating customers about what they can and cannot do. But Microsoft has also quietly laid the foundation to get the job done in a more programmatic way.

Windows Server 2008 R2 introduced a feature called File Classification Infastructure (FCI), which tags files with information that applications can be built with, said Bill Laing, corporate vice president of the company's server and cloud division. That is significant, because certain types of data (personal information or financial information) are governed by regulations and industry standards.

Microsoft has the capability to flag such data. All that is missing is a workflow for developers to use the data correctly in their cloud or hybrid applications. Windows Server AppFabric serves up on premises data for hybrid cloud applications. There is an opportunity for Microsoft to integrate more intelligence into AppFabric for regulatory compliance.

Laing wouldn't confirm my theory, but other Microsoft executives nodded their heads when I discussed it with them. Only time will tell whether this is what Microsoft intends to do, but it would be making a big step forward toward helping simplify cloud development should it build a compliance solution.