The US Department of Defense cannot show cost benefits, or even adequate security from cloud services, because it has no standard definition for what they are, and no central account of cloud contracts, according to an audit by the DOD inspector general. The audit was initially meant to assess the cost benefits DOD is achieving from cloud computing, but the report instead identifies the barriers to any such assessment, and how to remove them.
According to the audit report, the DOD uses the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s cloud computing definition (PDF).