Technology giant Google is gearing up to edge out close rivals Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud services space in India with its first cloud region (data centre) in Mumbai within this year.

With the Google Cloud India Region going live, enterprises in India will soon be able to take advantage of the high speeds, low latency and performance benefits uniquely offered by Google Cloud Platform services, a top company official said.

“We know that our customers need flexible and responsive relationships with their technology providers. To enable this for our customers in India and across the world, we have made several investments in strengthening our cloud partnerships,” Google Cloud MD Asia Pacific Rick Harshman, said according to reports.

Google Cloud has invested $30 billion, largely in infrastructure globally. In India, it says it has invested heavily in areas such as eco-system building for small, medium and large businesses.

The investment includes the company’s expenses in creating network infrastructure.

Google Cloud is also betting on its G-suite offering, which includes products such as Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar and Hangouts for Indian enterprises.

The India Cloud Region in Mumbai will be the fifth such centre in the Asia-Pacific region. The other such centres are in Tokyo, Taiwan, Singapore and Sydney. The Mumbai unit will also have its first storage facility in the country. This comes when the Indian government is working on a data protection law which could force global and local internet firms to store user data within the country’s geographic boundaries.

The company said its pay per minute model for customers would also help it get an edge over other cloud providers. While the competition isn’t asleep, Google says the opportunity for cloud services in India is huge. With 95 percent of computational workloads in the country yet to move to the cloud, the company says it is bullish.