India has huge potential for cloud services: Alibaba

India is a potential market for cloud computing services, said Yu Sicheng, Alibaba Group vice-president, said on Tuesday.

Yu made the remarks in an event on the sidelines of an event of the Alibaba Cloud Global, the subsidiary of Chinese e-commerce giant. He also announced the opening of cloud data centres in Europe and West Asia.

"India is definitely a country with huge potential and we will definitely let the audience know whenever we have a concrete plan," Yu told IANS.

There are reports of Alibaba Cloud Centre Global mulling to open a cloud data centre in India, which has the world's second-largest internet using population. The group has already entered Indian e-commerce market by investing in Snapdeal and Paytm.

Cloud computing allows one to store and access data on the internet rather than hard drive of a computer and server which is more prone to cyber-attacks.

The Alibaba entry could add to the fierce competition between Amazon and Microsoft in India. Microsoft already has cloud data centres while Amazon has announced it would set up five by the end of 2016.

"We will have four data centres in Japan, Dubai, Australia and Europe by the end of 2016," Yu said at the launch of AliLaunch, a programme under which foreign companies will use the cloud system to do business in China.

Alibaba took a shot at cloud computing seven years ago and is rapidly growing.

The Ali Cloud, known as Aliyun in Chinese, saw an increase of 175% at $165 million in the quarter ended March 2016.

It has cloud data centres in Singapore and the US.

The company is also trying to use the cloud technology in predicting weather and natural disasters.