Systems and methods for scalable delocalized information governance

A system for indexing a storage system, the system comprising:

• a control computer comprising a processor coupled to a non-transitory memory containing instructions causing the control computer to coordinate an indexing operation of data stored in a cloud comprising a plurality of items, each item stored in one of a plurality of data centers, wherein the plurality of items includes at least one of email accounts;
• documents;
• folders;
• and items that are not text-searchable held in email system files or document management systems, by:
• accessing each item within the data center where that item is stored;
• determining whether to index at least one of the plurality of items using a first process, wherein the first process determines whether to index an item directly, or to index the at least one of the plurality of items using a second process;
• causing the first process or the second process within that data center to index that item, wherein indexing items that are not text searchable comprises performing a character recognition operation on those items to generate text and identifying character strings within the text;
• collecting or compiling results from indexing the plurality of items;
• and
• providing a master index comprising all of the results, thereby allowing a user to find material within the storage system by using the master index.