If you’ve ever built an IoT product from the ground up, you know how it starts. The first prototype is always easy: you wire up a few sensors, connect over Wi-Fi or cellular, and push some data to the cloud. It works — until someone says the words that change everything:
“Okay, now let’s scale it.”
Suddenly, the “fun” part of building connected devices gives way to the messy middle: authentication, provisioning, firmware updates, dashboards, logging, alerts, certificates, retries, and reboots. The firmware team focuses on getting data off the device, the cloud team focuses on ingesting and storing it, and the space in between becomes a gray area of responsibility. Integrating those layers takes more coordination than anyone expected, and over time, the team finds itself maintaining infrastructure that doesn’t add new value to the product — it just keeps the lights on.
And that’s exactly where Golioth comes in.
The “Messy Middle” Problem
Every connected product, no matter how innovative, hits the same wall: getting reliable, secure data from devices into the cloud, and keeping it there at scale.
Building firmware and product features your users will love, that’s exciting. But building and maintaining the infrastructure that gets data from the edge to the cloud? That’s the messy middle. It’s the layer of plumbing between devices and cloud applications that nobody sets out to build, but every IoT product eventually needs.
This is where most teams start losing time and momentum. What begins as a simple proof of concept gradually expands into a complex ecosystem of systems and dependencies that has to stay online, scale, and evolve. Each addition feels necessary at the time, but together they create an infrastructure that needs as much attention as the product itself. Before long, your team isn’t just building a product — you’re running an entire IoT platform.
And the problem isn’t just technical, it’s organizational. Once you own that infrastructure, you’re responsible for it. You need engineers to operate it, DevOps to maintain it, QA to test it, and management to plan for its lifecycle. Those costs compound over time and quietly turn into a second product you never intended to build.
This messy middle is what slows teams down, eats into budgets, and shifts focus away from innovation. It’s not what differentiates your product, but it’s what keeps it from moving forward when handled in-house.
That’s exactly the layer Golioth abstracts away, so your team can focus on building great devices and meaningful experiences, not maintaining the infrastructure in between.
Focus on What Actually Matters
When you use Golioth, you don’t have to think about:
- How to securely connect thousands of devices to the cloud
- How to push firmware updates over the air
- How to log, store, and route data to the right systems
You just build your product.
By leveraging Golioth’s Device Management, Data Routing, and Application Services, your team can focus on innovation and not infrastructure. You can iterate faster, run real-world tests earlier, and deploy with confidence knowing your foundation is solid.
It’s the difference between spending six to twelve months building an IoT backbone versus spending six days integrating one.
The Business Case for Using Golioth
This is often where the conversation with your boss begins or where it gets stuck.
“Why do we need another platform?”
“Can’t we just build it ourselves?”
The answer is: sure, you can. But should you?
Every hour your team spends managing TLS certificates, maintaining cloud infrastructure, or troubleshooting firmware updates is an hour not spent improving your product’s value. Those tasks are operational costs, not competitive advantages.
What often gets overlooked in the “build vs. buy” debate is the DevOps burden that comes with building it yourself. Once you decide to roll your own IoT backend, you’re not just creating infrastructure; you’re committing to owning it. That means servers, monitoring, scaling, uptime, incident response, and ongoing maintenance.
Golioth eliminates that DevOps cost and responsibility. We take care of the connectivity layer, device provisioning, scaling, and monitoring, all the operational work that keeps an IoT system running reliably. Your team doesn’t have to worry about uptime, infrastructure tuning, or maintenance; it’s all handled as part of the platform.
And as your product matures, you’ll inevitably want to add new features for your customers. That also means new requirements for your infrastructure: new APIs, new scaling needs, and new integrations. If you’ve built your own stack, you’re now maintaining and evolving two products: your core product and the Golioth equivalent platform you’ve built on the side.
Golioth turns all of that complexity into a managed service. We handle the operational layer, device connectivity, data ingestion, routing, and cloud integration, so your team can stay focused on your users, your data, and your differentiation.
Engineering Freedom, Not Lock-In
Golioth isn’t just an IoT “cloud” — it’s an IoT data company. Our core mission is to help you move data cleanly, securely, and reliably between the physical world (your devices) and your cloud infrastructure.
We provide device management capabilities because they’re essential to making that data journey possible. You can register, provision, monitor, and update devices at scale with just a few lines of code. But that’s only part of the story. The real value is in the data itself, the insights your devices generate, and how you use them to shape your product, your operations, and your customer experience.
Golioth is the vessel that carries that data from your devices to wherever it needs to go. Whether it’s streaming telemetry to analytics tools, routing events to webhooks, or archiving logs in cloud storage, we make sure your data arrives intact and ready for use, without locking you into a single ecosystem.
You own the data. Always. It’s your differentiator, the reason your product stands out in the market. Our job is to make sure nothing gets in the way of you collecting it, moving it, and using it. Route your data to AWS, GCP, InfluxDB, or anywhere else your architecture requires.
Golioth gives you the freedom to evolve your stack as your product grows, to adapt, migrate, and scale, without ever losing control of your most valuable asset: your data.
We’re here to accelerate your roadmap, not dictate it.
Wrapping It Up
Convincing your boss isn’t about buzzwords or hype. It’s about showing that engineering time is precious, and that the unsexy, repetitive parts of IoT don’t need to be reinvented for the hundredth time.
With Golioth, your team can:
- Reduce development risk by starting from a proven IoT foundation
- Speed up time to market by skipping infrastructure work
- Optimize resources by focusing only on what differentiates your product
If your goal is to launch within the next year, Golioth gives you the end-to-end infrastructure to get there — securely, efficiently, and without distraction.
Let your engineers focus on what they do best: building great products.
Let Golioth handle the rest.
No comments yet! Start the discussion at forum.golioth.io