Google will set up its first India data centre in Mumbai by 2017, hoping to take on global incumbents such as Microsoft and Amazon, who have a presence in the country, and allow local customers to host their applications on the internet.

Google controls a majority market share in India in search, email and on smartphones through is Android operating system. It also has a significant presence in offering enterprise applications such as mail and other services, but lags behind Microsoft and Amazon in its cloud business.

Amazon has three data centres, one each in Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, with over 75,000 customers, including taxi hailing app Ola, Tata Motors and television network NDTV, on its cloud. Last year, Microsoft set up three data centres in India offering its Azure cloud to local customers.

Google, which already hosts applications of its Indian customers such as Wipro, Ashok Leyland, Smartshift by Mahindra & Mahindra, Dainik Bhaskar Group and INshorts.com on its global cloud platform, expects a India presence to service local customers faster. Google calls it data centre Cloud Region.

However, this center might also require data center security measures that can protect it from advanced cyberattacks. Data centers could be a prime target for such attacks, which is why taking preventive measures beforehand might make sense.

Coming back, Google Cloud Platform takes the infrastructure, machine learning and networking services used to power Google services and makes them available to businesses and developers to build high performance applications and data analysis at a low cost. As India’s start-up community continues to grow, Cloud Platform provides the full stack of services to build, test and deploy their applications.