Cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services have made it much simpler to store and manage large volumes of data, but there are still challenges. They’re particularly pronounced for companies that rely on multiple providers, which constitute a fast-growing part of the overall market.

Scality Inc. has taken it upon itself to address the challenge. The storage startup, which is backed by over $90 million in venture capital, today unveiled an open-source project called Zenko that aims to ease the administration of multicloud environments.

At the heart of the software is a unified programming interface for accessing and managing information. It’s a carry-over from Scality S3 Server, a free tool that the startup created to let developers interact with an on-premise storage environment using the same controls implemented by Amazon S3.

As Scality chief technology officer Giorgio Regni explained, the latter service is the gold standard when it comes to managing data stored in the form of objects. The reason why this holds significance is that many of the cloud applications and other modern workloads in the average organization use an object-based storage scheme.

According to Scality, providing the ability to access a storage environment using controls modeled after S3’s interface thus makes it easier to build applications and eases management. There’s also the added benefit of familiarity, since many developers are already well-versed in using the retailer’s giant cloud platform.

Zenko extends S3 Server’s features beyond on-premises infrastructure to cloud platforms that compete with AWS. According to Scality, the platform provides the ability to use Amazon’s interface as the access layer for storage capacity rented from Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Plus, upcoming management features slated to arrive in September will help administrators ensure that all those deployments run smoothly.

The biggest item on the list is a policy engine for regulating how information is used across a company’s different storage environments. According to Scality, the update will enable users to easily replicate information across clouds, migrate a deployment from one platform to another if  necessary and analyze activity.

The latter feature will be powered by what the startup describes as a “metadata search engine” that is based on another open-source project, Apache Spark. Scality’s goal is to let operations personnel easily find specific records within their companies’ data troves and identify patterns that might reveal areas for improvement.

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