I just recieved ESRI's mass mailing about the cloud. They claim to be first. Thats a bald face lie. Cloud GIS is provided by lots of people including, well CouldGIS.com. I digress.
There are OGC standards for cloud GIS computing and using multithreaded worker applications for geoprocessing. The "cloud" part can be centralized or decentralized (for example the method the SETI utiliyzes is decentralized). There are already methods to provide what you are looking for, it just isnt in the ArcGIS toolkit.
I think you would be better served to find a data cloud provider and not bother petitioning ESRI. The lock-in to their data types and software really limits what you can do with your data.
ArcGIS online is what it is, but what you are searching for is out there.