The invention relates to electronic indexing, and more particularly, to the indexing, in a cloud, data held in a cloud. Systems and methods of the invention index data by accessing the data in place in the cloud and breaking a job into work items and sending the work items to multiple cloud processes that can each determine whether to index data associated with the work item or to create a new work item and have a different cloud process index the data. Each cloud process is proximal to an item that it indexes. This gives the system scale as well as an internal load-balancing.