COMPARISON OF CLOUD SERVICE CONSUMPTION IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC, VISEGRAD GROUP AND EUROPEAN UNION

Adoption of cloud services has an increasing trend for many years already and no indication that it should change in close future has occurred. Moreover, cloud consumption has been further enhanced due to the COVID-19 situation since a great number of employees started to work from home and therefore, they need to access resources over the internet. This article describes the performed analysis of official data provided by the European Union on the consumption of cloud services in the member countries. The analysis particularly focused on comparing the cloud consumption in the Czech Republic, Visegrad Group and European Union in total. The consumption was compared based on multiple criteria - primarily on cloud service types, organization types, consumption trends. The analysis was conducted over sets of biannual data (2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020) that are available on the Eurostat site for all the European Union countries. The comparison showed that the level of cloud consumption differs across and that the average consumption for the European Union is higher than in the Czech Republic and in Visegrad Group. Besides, the comparison revealed that consumption in the Czech Republic is slightly higher than in Visegrad Group. Such pattern in the comparison between the three subjects was present in the majority of comparisons and therefore it might be stated that the Czech Republic and Visegrad Group are behind the average cloud consumption in European Union. This article is closely related to the Information Management as one of the aims of the E&M Economics and Management journal.