cellular connection to raspberry PI

Hey gang,

So mr clueless over here has been tasked with getting a raspberry PI to transmit data, it captures from a device, through a sim card to somewhere accessable- website i guess.

So l have got the Pi2, loaded rasberian with noobs, and now need some direction from you lovely people as to where to start on the cell connections side.

Do I simply grab a dongle similar to what we use for mobile internet on laptop or is that different from connecting over 3g, LTE?

Once that is done and talking to the cloud - i guess the next hurdle would be coding to get the PI to transmit this data periodically (midnight) and to allow me to access it randomly to check the status of device.

Big ask, whose out there?