1. A method of providing data protection using backup processes in a cloud computing environment, comprising: storing, on a data storage device, a cloud object model to represent resources available in the cloud computing environment as hardware islands, and a relationship mapping to control protection logic of the backup processes to protect workloads across redundant sets of hardware of the cloud computing environment to facilitate flexible management of resources across multiple sites of the cloud computing environment; determining a relative tiering of the workloads based on priority and importance of a workload relative to other workloads to define a critical workload and a non-critical workload; registering, by a hardware processor, a first compute cluster with a first hardware island; designating the first compute cluster as being of a particular cluster type; receiving, from a user, an indication to provision the first compute cluster with storage; accessing the model to determine a cluster type of the first compute cluster; and provisioning the first compute cluster with storage corresponding to the particular cluster type, wherein the storage provisioned is appropriate for the relative tiering of the workload, and comprises one of replicated storage or non-replicated storage to store data according to a data protection technique implemented by the control protection logic and comprising one of: replication, continuous availability, and failover.