In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the spread of cloud computing devices in all commercial, industrial and agricultural sectors. The use of cloud computing environment services is increasing exponentially with all technology applications based on IoT. Fog computing has led to addressing issues in cloud computing environments. Fog computing reduces load balancing, processing, bandwidth, and storage as data file replication from the cloud to the network closest to sensors in different geographic locations. There are three critical issues:—what data should be replicated?—when should the data be replicated? and—where the new replicas should be placed? These three main open questions must be tackled for data replication in the cloud environments. This strategy, the identification and mode of the data replication problem are designed as a multi-objective optimization with modern meta-heuristic optimization method. Therefore, a new hybrid method using Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm (AOA) and the salp swarm algorithm (SSA) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a new hybrid metaheuristic method, using the Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm (AOA) and the salp swarm algorithm (SSA), is proposed to handle the problem of selection and placement data replication in fog computing. Secondly, the Floyd algorithm is used to strategy the least cost path, distance, and data transmission in different geographic locations. The performance of the designed AOASSA strategy to tackling the data replication problem is evaluated using different datasets of different sizes. To validate the AOASSA strategy, a set of experiments was carried out to validate the proposed strategy AOASSA. Experiment results show the superiority of AOASSA over its competitors in terms of performance measures, such as least cost path, distance, and bandwidth.