A cloud environment is provided generally having at least one 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 in the cloud environment, the private data center is the recipient of the data object because the specific data bucket is located in the private data center and not in the public cloud storage service. 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 public cloud storage service provider is communicatively linked to the end-user computing system by way of the controller/routing system. The data center is independent of the public cloud storage provider.