Patent ID: 8495356

Claim:
A cloud computing data processing system comprising: a hardware appliance having a secure container configured for communicative coupling to different hypervisors, each of the different hypervisors supporting virtual machine (VM) storage in a cloud computing environment; a data store of VM images for storage in at least one of the different hypervisors; and, a secure distribution module executing in the memory of the hardware appliance, the module comprising program code enabled upon execution in the hardware appliance to compose at least one VM disk in a secure container, which is configured to deploy VM images into the cloud computing environment, to encrypt the composed at least one VM disk, to transmit the at least one encrypted VM disk to a hypervisor in the cloud computing environment, to generate a bootloader associated with the encrypted VM disk in the secure container, to generate a security token for the bootloader, to transmit the bootloader to the hypervisor in the cloud computing environment, to receive a request to activate a VM instance, to request a key by the bootloader, to verify the bootloader using the security token, and to provide the key to the bootloader to unlock the at least one VM disk upon verification of the bootloader.