One of the questions we hear from IT teams evaluating condition monitoring solutions is straightforward: what does this do to our network? It's a fair question. Most IoT deployments add devices to the facility network, which means more endpoints to manage, more firewall rules to configure, and more assets to include in security protocols.
Atomation works differently. Our sensors and gateways don't connect to your network at all — and that's by design.
Traditional IoT condition monitoring systems connect sensors through facility WiFi or Ethernet. Each device gets an IP address, needs network credentials, and routes data through the organization's internet connection. For IT teams, that means provisioning access, configuring VLANs, updating firewall rules, and adding every sensor to their asset inventory. Scale that across dozens or hundreds of monitoring points and the administrative overhead adds up fast.
Atomation's architecture skips all of that. Our sensors — Atoms — communicate using low-power wireless protocols to a battery-powered cellular gateway that carries its own independent cellular connection. The entire data path, from sensor to gateway to cloud, runs outside your facility's network infrastructure.
There's no WiFi configuration. No Ethernet cables. No IP addresses on your LAN. No coordination with IT to get monitoring up and running.
For IT and security teams, Atomation's architecture is refreshingly simple: there's nothing to manage. Atoms don't show up in network scans. They don't appear in your logs. They don't create pathways between the public internet and your internal systems. They don’t rely on any changes by the IT team such as password or new network configuration.
This matters because the operational technology landscape is getting more complex, not less. Every device on a facility network is one more thing to patch, monitor, and account for during security audits. Condition monitoring should give your operations team better visibility into equipment health — it shouldn't give your IT team more infrastructure to worry about.
With Atomation, it doesn't. Your maintenance team gets the alerts they need. Your IT environment stays exactly the way it was before deployment.
This architecture wasn't a reaction to security trends. It's a natural result of solving a different problem: how do you monitor legacy equipment in environments where running cables and extending network infrastructure isn't practical?
Industrial facilities often have critical equipment spread across large outdoor areas, remote locations, or temporary installations. Running power and data cables to every monitoring point isn't feasible, and extending WiFi coverage to every corner of a quarry or processing plant doesn't make sense. So we built a system that operates independently — wireless sensors, battery-powered gateways, cellular connectivity.
The security benefit is a direct consequence of that independence. When devices don't live on your network, they can't become network liabilities. No inbound connections to manage. No credentials stored on the device that could be compromised. No interaction with your routers, switches, or access points.
Independence from the facility network doesn't mean isolation from your business systems. Atomation's REST API provides full programmatic access to all of your monitoring data — alert history, sensor readings, device status, and configuration details. Your team can pull data into a CMMS, ERP, or custom analytics platform through standard server-to-server integration.
The key distinction is that this integration happens at the application layer through authenticated API calls, not at the network layer through device connections. Your systems request data from Atomation's cloud platform on their terms, through their existing outbound connections. Nothing new gets added to the facility network.
The goal of condition monitoring is simple: know what's happening with your critical equipment so you can act before problems become failures. Getting there shouldn't require a network infrastructure project.
Atomation gives operations teams continuous monitoring on the equipment that matters most — conveyors, pumps, motors, gearboxes — while keeping the deployment completely independent from facility IT systems. Your maintenance team gets actionable alerts. Your IT team gets peace of mind. And your network stays exactly as clean as it was before you started monitoring.