Keeping up its push to get more large enterprises to use its cloud, Google LLC today announced a new Premium Support plan for enterprises running mission-critical workloads on its cloud infrastructure.

Google said the cost of the Premium Support plan will be based on each customer’s monthly spend, but it certainly won’t be cheap: Prices start at a minimum of $12,500 per month, according to the company’s pricing calculator.

Still, some enterprises may decide it’s worth paying for the extra special attention they’ll receive. As part of the plan, Google is promising a 15-minute response time for “P1 cases,” which are situations where a mission-critical application or vital infrastructure is unusable. The plan also covers new product reviews and training, plus troubleshooting for third-party systems and services.

“Premium Support has been designed to better meet the needs of our customers running modern cloud technology,” said Atul Nanda, Google’s vice president of cloud support. “And we’ve made investments to improve the customer experience, with an updated support model that is proactive, unified, centered around the customer, and flexible to meet the differing needs of their businesses.”

Google promises that Premium Support customers will be able to call on “content-aware experts” who know their application and infrastructure stack inside out. Customers will also have access to a dedicated Technical Account manager who will help them work through any issues that come up. Furthermore, they can choose to pay more to have technical account managers in multiple regions, so that there’s always someone available to assist them should things go wrong.

The Premium Support option will also enable customers to be more proactive, Google said. It will include something called “site reliability engineering engagement,” which evaluates and helps customers to “design a wrapper of supportability” around those Google Cloud customer projects that are most sensitive to downtime. In addition, Google’s support team will also help Premium customers to prepare for special events such as Black Friday, the post-Thanksgiving Day retail rush that often lead to huge spikes in traffic that could potentially cause problems.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE the new support tier was yet more evidence of Google doing everything it can to close the gap between it and its infrastructure-as-a-service rivals Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

“[Google is] pushing the envelope with its 15 minute response times,” Mueller said. “That’s certainly a good conversation topic to convince target enterprises, which are the most critical and skeptical hold overs. Those enterprises have never enjoyed such quick responses from their current on-premises platform and hardware partners, so this will be an argument to mute some of the cloud sceptics. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft and AWS respond and in a few quarters, how much of the market Google Cloud can capture with this service level agreement.”

Images: Google