But since Apple hasn't shown an inclination to discuss this in depth, despite repeated inquiries from Network World and others, there's no way to understand what's going on in that Apple cloud.

"You can see why IBM is concerned," Eng says.

"Siri is more of a novelty now, an infant technology," says Daniel Ford, chief security officer at Sterling, Va.-based mobile risk management vendor Fixmo. "It's gathering data about you, digitizing it, and sending it to Apple's cloud." He said he thinks Apple doesn't share the information with anyone else, but he acknowledges, "We don't know how Apple is parsing it." He says it's not surprising enterprises would want to turn it off.

"Siri scares the hell out of me, to be honest," says Paul Henry, security and forensic analyst at Lumension, adding that Apple has provided no explanation about what it's mining the Siri data for, if anything. He points out Apple has incited privacy and security concerns before, when it was recognized that Apple was sending location data back to Apple, purportedly to use for targeted ads.

Apple is going to find it hard to win the confidence of the enterprise security manager without addressing Siri, Henry says. Google and , as well as VMware, have all been better than Apple in disclosures related to security in their products. But Apple, which is consumer-focused, hasn't yet reached the level of response that IT security managers traditionally expect, he notes.