Implementing cloud computing empowers numerous paths for Web-based service offerings to meet diverse needs. However, the data security and privacy has become a critical issue that restricts many cloud applications. One of the major concerns in security and privacy is caused by the fact that cloud operators have chances to reach the sensitive data. This concern dramatically increases users' anxiety and reduces the adoptability of cloud computing in many fields, such as the financial industry and governmental agencies. This paper focuses on this issue and proposes an intelligent cryptography approach, by which the cloud service operators cannot directly reach partial data. The proposed approach divides the file and separately stores the data in the distributed cloud servers. An alternative approach is designed to determine whether the data packets need a split in order to shorten the operation time. The proposed scheme is entitled Security-Aware Efficient Distributed Storage (SA-EDS) model, which is mainly supported by our proposed algorithms, including Alternative Data Distribution (ADZ) Algorithm, Secure Efficient Data Distributions (SED2) Algorithm and Efficient Data Conflation (EDCon) Algorithm. Our experimental evaluations have assessed both security and efficiency performances and the experimental results depict that our approach can effectively defend main threats from clouds and requires with an acceptable computation time. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.