What is Soracom Direct?
Soracom Direct is our leased line connectivity service that you can use to create a totally private datapath between Soracom and your servers through a dedicated physical connection just for your IoT messaging.
Unlike a VPN which adds a layer of encryption to secure Internet traffic as it passes through the Internet infrastructure of gateways, routers, and network provider connections, Direct implements a connectivity architecture that is fully isolated from the Internet to ensure privacy and control over all of the network components and connections between your IoT devices and your hosted systems.
When you use a Soracom Direct connection, you’ll also reduce the chance of hitting data bottlenecks or unexpected increases in latency that can be introduced when you route your messages over the Internet.
All cellular connectivity is built on encrypted messaging standards that your IoT devices can rely on for the data link from the device to our cellular infrastructure, Direct compliments that encryption and works in conjunction with Soracom’s Virtual Private Gateway (VPG) routing options to lock down unsecured Internet access and give you the routing options that you need for your IoT solution combined with a fully isolated data path that’s ideal when your IoT systems will be handling the most secure and most valuable data.
Did you know?
If your hosted logic runs on AWS EC2 instances, then take a look at our Soracom Canal private networking service.
Our Soracom systems already run on AWS systems, when you use Soracom Canal you can make use of Amazon’s internal private networking features to bring fully isolated messaging to your IoT systems – you might not even require Soracom Direct to achieve the data privacy solution that your system requires.
Soracom Direct Architecture
Our IoT Platform architecture uses dedicated private connections that connect directly to the cellular core infrastructure operated by our worldwide network partners. When you enable Soracom Direct for your environment, you will be in control of the private routing of your data to your servers and ensure that your data is not routed to an Internet gateway.
We provide Direct as a connectivity option of our Platform, there are no requirements on your IoT devices or management overheads for data preparation or protocol selection that you need to implement on your end devices to keep your data private.
Did you know?
If you’re looking for a VPN solution that will secure all of your messaging while your data is still inside the cellular core network then take a look at Soracom Door. Door provides an IPsec VPN endpoint on our platform that you can use to form a secure tunnel to the IPsec VPN endpoint at your server. As you’d expect from a VPN solution all of your data is encrypted to industry standards before it passes over any of the public Internet infrastructure so you can be sure that your data is private and trustable.
Virtual Private Gateway (VPG)
Our Virtual Private Gateway (VPG) service works alongside Soracom Direct to give you all of the message routing controls that you need to keep your IoT architecture secure. You can consider the VPG as your own dedicated secure cellular network for your IoT devices covering a range of message routing options including the blocking of public internet access to your messaging and the creation of secure tunnels to your servers so that you can route data. When you use Soracom Direct with a VPG you can use the VPG to close down public internet access from your devices and use Soracom Direct to route your data privately to your IoT system logic without changing the data structure or protocol on your devices.
To learn more about the Soracom VPG service and see how you can easily add leased line connections to your servers (Soracom Door) or VPC peering to AWS EC2 instances that you might be using (Soracom Canal) or enable secure remote access (Soracom Napter), or a host of networking control features take a look at our dedicated webpage.
Don’t forget: If you want a more streamlined solution for secure data ingestion than our private networking options then take a look at Soracom Funnel or Soracom Funk to see how Soracom can directly support the IoT platforms offered by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon
Getting Started With Soracom Direct
The best way to get started with our Soracom IoT services is to speak with our team about your IoT deployment. We’ll help you set up quickly so you can start configuring Soracom Direct to your application’s specific requirements.
Alternatively, you can create your free Soracom account now and start setting it up yourself without the need to speak with us, and view our detailed developer documentation for technical support.