Replacing an existing IoT monitoring system

Organisations whose IoT monitoring vendor has withdrawn from hardware, raised prices sharply, or stopped supporting installed devices can move to the ZARC platform without losing monitoring continuity.

The changeover is planned around your sites, your sensors stay in service until their replacements are proven, and the system arrives fitted, configured and running as delivered.

The orphaned estate

When a vendor leaves you with the hardware

Renewal notices

They still arrive from a company that no longer sells the hardware they cover.

Slower support

Responses take longer each year, and eventually fixes stop coming at all.

A frozen portal

It looks exactly as it did the day it was installed.

Spares

Replacement units are quoted at surprising prices, on long lead times, or not at all.

Plenty of monitoring estates in the UK are now orphaned. The devices are still on the walls and the data still arrives, but the company that supplied them has moved on. Hardware is discontinued, support has wound down, and nobody is writing a roadmap.

Nothing fails on the day the vendor walks away, which is exactly why an orphaned estate is easy to leave alone. What degrades is the repair path. Spares stop being available, firmware issues stay unfixed, and when a hard failure does arrive there is nothing behind it.

The useful window is while the old system is still working, because a changeover planned in that window runs to a timeline you set and costs considerably less than the same work done in an emergency.

If you have nothing to replace and are looking at monitoring for the first time, the solutions pages are the better starting point. This page assumes a system already in place.

01

Cost

The renewal letter that doubled

Contracts that arrive cheap and renew expensive are common in this market. If the annual cost has stopped matching what the system actually does, a like-for-like changeover is straightforward to price and compare.

02

Silent failure

The failure nobody noticed

Some organisations find that their monitoring stopped working months earlier and nothing flagged it. A system that fails silently is worse than having none, because the estate is treated as covered the whole time it is not. ZARC reports its own health, so a node that stops being heard is itself an alert.

03

Supplier fit

Simply wanting off

Poor support, slow fixes, a platform that never improved. No single trigger, just a supplier relationship that has run its course, which is reason enough on its own.

04

Deadline

The network switch-off

The PSTN and ADSL lines that many older monitoring systems depend on are being withdrawn. Openreach has published its timetable, with the PSTN switch-off set for 31 January 2027. If your system dials out or reports over one of those lines, the withdrawal date is your deadline whether or not you set one, and planning a changeover early means choosing your window rather than joining the queue.

05

Continuity

What you keep and what changes

More carries over than most organisations expect. Alert thresholds, escalation contacts and reporting routines are configuration, and configuration transfers. The survey establishes where existing sensor positions and wiring can be reused, and monitoring history is handled as described below: imported where your current platform can export it, archived where it cannot.

What changes is the platform underneath. New ZARC nodes, a current portal, and a supplier with a roadmap. The day-to-day experience is deliberately kept simple: the people who respond to alerts should not need retraining to use it.

06

The platform

What the ZARC platform brings

The ZARC platform is a full stack designed and built in the UK: hardware, firmware and cloud platform from one supplier, with live UK deployments at national scale.

Node health is reported alongside the readings. A node that goes quiet is picked up the same way any other fault is. The radio design is transmit-only, with no inbound radio-control path, which removes that class of attack surface.

And because the stack is ours end to end, there is no third party whose commercial decisions can orphan your estate a second time.

How it runs

What replacement involves

The process starts with a survey of your sites and of the estate you already have: what is monitored, which alerts matter, and what history you need to keep.

The changeover then runs in phases. New ZARC nodes go in alongside the outgoing kit and run against it until they are proven, and only then does the old system come out. Coverage never drops while that is happening. There is no engineering burden on your side. Equipment arrives fitted, configured and running as delivered. The full stack (hardware, firmware and cloud platform) is designed and built in the UK.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Our IoT vendor has discontinued our hardware. What are our options?

There are three: keep running and accept that the risk grows, stockpile spares while they can still be bought, or plan a phased changeover while the current system is still working. Only the third removes the risk instead of postponing it.

Can we keep our existing sensors?

Sometimes. It depends on what they are and how they communicate. The site survey establishes what can be integrated and what should be replaced. Where existing kit operates on 868 MHz, integration with your equipment can be assessed as part of the survey.

What happens to our historical data?

If your current platform can export it, it can usually be imported so trends are not lost. Where export is not possible, the old record is preserved as an archive and new history builds from changeover day.

How long does a changeover take?

A single site is usually a matter of days. Multi-site estates run in phases so that no site is ever uncovered, and the survey produces a timeline before anything is committed.

Will there be a gap in monitoring?

No. New nodes run alongside the outgoing system until they are proven. Cutover happens per site, only when both sides agree it is ready.

If any of this sounds familiar,
talk to us.

There is no cost or obligation in discussing a survey.

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