Structural Health Monitoring rarely fails through dramatic system breakdowns. Instead, it quietly deteriorates through data gaps, transmission interruptions, mounting issues, and constant maintenance overhead until engineers stop relying on it altogether. The real challenge in long term SHM is no longer sensing itself, but continuity — the ability to deliver reliable, trusted data over months and years without repeated site intervention. In this conversation with Dr. Mahesh Verma, we explore why most long term monitoring systems struggle operationally and what must change for SHM to become a truly dependable intelligence layer for infrastructure, and discuss how we are addressing these issues at Nirixense.