A cloud environment is provided generally having a private data center possessing a controller/routing system and nonvolatile mass storage, a plurality of data objects retained in the nonvolatile mass storage, and a public cloud storage service provider linked to the controller/routing system. The public cloud storage service provider possessing a database containing policy decisions and metadata of the plurality of data objects. When a data object is uploaded by an end-user to a specific data bucket to the private data center in the cloud environment. Meta data and location information about the data object is uploaded to the public cloud storage service provider. The private data center is not in possession of the policy decisions and the metadata for data objects. The data center is independent of the public cloud storage provider.