Speaking at iapp's privacy umbrella of cloud computing conference in Sydney, EFA's chairman, Colin Jacobs, said the increased use of virtualised environments creates a new set of privacy risks for the enterprise.

"Privacy is getting bigger and bigger as an issue and is coming up on our radar screen," Jacobs said. "The legalities and regulations are complicated...but one thing is certainly clear, in that people value their privacy."

Jacobs said that the EFA community, a non-profit national organisation representing internet users, had an increase of privacy concerns brought to its attention due to cloud computing and the increase of information that enterprise is putting into these sites.

"The cloud exacerbates these issues as people migrate more and more of their lives into it," he said. "Digital reputation is something we hear a lot more about and it affects people's reputation...it's a deep human need that's not going away anytime soon."

With the EFA recently giving testimony to a Senate inquiry into privacy, Jacobs said IT managers must take a number of issues into account before engaging with an external cloud provider.