A model for providing solutions to the security issue of the cloud computing environment is addressed in this article by proposing a distributed collaborative trust service recommender (DTSR) system. DTSRs are kept in a distributed manner spread over the clouds, and they are used to extract raw trust from different sources. This trust information is based on the feedback by cloud service user's observation about the adherence of a cloud service provider (CSP) to a service level agreement for the cloud-based service provided. Using this trust data, the overall trust of CSPs is computed by using collaborative computation. The trust values are propagated among the distributed DTSRs in the network so that the trust values are available to everyone in the cloud environment. Experiments were conducted, which clearly shows that our proposed system is useful in providing a secure multicloud environment. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.