INTRODUCTIONCloud computing has attracted great interest in the IT industry. Market research and analytics firm IDC suggests that the market for cloud computing services was $16 billion in 2008 and will rise to $42 billion annually by 2012 (Chhabra, Verma & Taneja, 2010). The era of cloud computing introduces a new dimension for businesses. The academic and research worlds have developed a keen interest in the challenges and issues introduced by this relatively new concept (Sriram & Khajeh-Hosseini, 2009). As experienced by large or small businesses while adopting cloud computing technology, the issues can be delineated as security, privacy, data migration such as (Hosseini, et al., 2010). The adoption of cloud technology by businesses, especially those using KBE (knowledge based engineering) are at risk in terms of migrating their data to the cloud. Most businesses are busy creating, sharing, streaming, and storing data in digital formats to enable collaboration, so there is a need to continually manage and protect data to ensure its value and authenticity (Yale & Chow, 2011). Businesses now acquire more and more information about their products, customers and partners, whether or not it is stored in a cloud environment, and failure to protect this data can be harmful. Partners and customers anticipate that their information will be consistently protected before conducting business with a company. Internally there is a need for comprehensive data governance to manage and protect crucial data, which has become a key issue for the cloud (Yale, 2011). The literature review aims to address the adoption of cloud computing within enterprises using KBE systems and how this cloud adoption will affect data management... middle of paper... this process and there may be several months between the decision to procure the hardware and the delivery, configuration and use of the hardware. The use of cloud computing can significantly reduce this time period, but the most significant change involves user empowerment and the diffusion of IT department authority, as highlighted by Yanosky [20]. For example, a training coordinator at a company that needs a few servers to run a week-long web-based training course can bypass the IT department and run the training course in the cloud. They could pay the bill for cloud usage using their personal credit card and pass the amount back as expenses to the employee. A similar scenario was recently reported by BP, where a group bypassed the company's procurement, IT, and security processes by using AWS to host a new customer-facing website [10].