An Exact Placement Approach for Optimizing Cost and Recovery Time under Faulty Multi-cloud Environments Currently, Cloud brokers bring interoperability and portability of applications across multiple Clouds. In the future, Cloud brokers will offer services based on their knowledge of Cloud providers infrastructure to automatically and cost-effectively overcome performance degradation. In this paper, we present a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) that provides a cost-effective placement across multiple Clouds. Our MILP formulation considers parameters of Cloud providers such as price, configuration of VMs, network latency, and provisioning time. We evaluate the cost-effectiveness of deploying a Cloudinfrastructure into a single or across multiple Cloud providers by using real prices and VM configurations. The results show that in some cases may be cost-effective to distribute the infrastructure across multiple Cloud providers. We also propose three placement policies for faulty multi-Cloud scenarios. The best of these policies minimizes the cost of the Cloud infrastructure under fixed provisioning time values.