In IoT marketing, many providers boast that they provision their services from their own cloud. Some are also using wording like full stack, similarly to BaseN. Everything is nice and virtual! And almost free!

Well. What does it mean to have your own cloud? The reality is that most of these claimants actually buy virtual servers from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM or from a local telco, and build their quick hack services on top of them. Location diagrams and capacities are then just copied from the host’s marketing materials.

When building real IoT applications with real scalability, using off-the-shelf virtual servers from other providers quickly becomes unsustainable what comes to managing resilience, load balancing and especially finances. Virtual server providers are very good at selling low price throw-in products, but the devil is in the details of numerous cost items which become relevant when capacity is increased to production levels.

It is important to understand that the typical IT-type virtual server provider has multiple service locations, but it’s the customers’ headache to design a resilient solution covering the required geography. Moreover, the customer is responsible for all operating system upgrades, security patches and a wealth of other moving parts. It’s all nice if you have a very experienced coder & network engineering team in place, but those are nowadays hard to come by.

When BaseN talks about its own cloud, it’s the real thing from the ground up, and we take full responsibility of our full stack. This includes physical servers, networking equipment, global IP addressing and routing, unified operating systems and especially BaseN Platform, which is a fully distributed and resilient computing, storage and content delivery platform – and a perfect platform for real and sustainable IoT.

‘They’re not just another AWS wrapper like most of them, but a real thing’ – as one of our more technical customers put it.

//Pasi

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