A few years ago, “connectivity problems” lived in the same mental drawer as lost luggage and hotel Wi-Fi. Annoying, but not strategic. Today, that drawer is empty. Connectivity has quietly moved into the risk register.

Not because teams suddenly became more dependent on Slack or Teams. That already happened. The shift is that the cost of being offline is no longer just minutes wasted. It can be a safety gap. A compliance gap. A financial surprise. A reputational dent. Sometimes all four at once.

And the uncomfortable part is how often the failure looks small at first.

It starts with one person. One airport. One “I’ll sort it later.”
Then your CFO cannot approve payments in transit. Your engineer cannot access the service ticket on-site. Your country manager cannot authenticate into the VPN. Your duty-of-care provider cannot reach your traveler when an incident kicks off. Your IT team gets a Monday morning ticket dump that reads like a crime scene.

That is what “business risk” looks like in 2026. It is rarely dramatic. It is just expensive.

Why “no signal” is not the real problem

When connectivity breaks, we focus on the symptom: bars, coverage, speed. But business risk shows up in second-order effects:

• Lost time compounds: one missed authentication window becomes a delayed handover, then a missed meeting, then a project slip.
• Workarounds become security holes: people switch to personal hotspots, unmanaged apps, random public Wi-Fi, and suddenly your security posture depends on how stressed your traveler is.
• Small billing surprises become policy battles: roaming spikes, “unlimited” that throttles, or background app use that quietly burns through an allowance.
• Support becomes reactive: IT only finds out after the traveler is already stuck and improvising.

This is exactly why corporate travel risk management keeps circling back to communications as a core control. ISO 31030, the travel risk management guidance standard, explicitly frames travel risk as something organizations must assess, treat, and communicate around across the trip lifecycle.

If your traveler cannot communicate, a lot of your other controls become theoretical.

The modern risk stack: productivity, security, duty of care

Here is what I see companies missing when they treat connectivity as a “telco detail” instead of a business layer.

The three common failure modes

1) Productivity failure

This is the obvious one, and it is still underestimated. A traveling employee is usually traveling for high-value work. If a senior person loses two hours in transit to connectivity chaos, that is not “two hours.” It is a decision delayed, a client waiting, a team blocked.

2) Security failure

Connectivity failures force behavior changes. People route around friction. They sign into whatever works. In cybersecurity, that is not a footnote. It is a pattern.

NIST’s incident response guidance emphasizes the need for coordinated processes and fast response to reduce organizational impact from incidents. Communication pathways and speed matter because the costs of disruption and loss escalate quickly.
Now apply that logic to travelers: if your roaming setup collapses, your secure access workflows collapse with it. And “just this once” is how exceptions become habits.

3) Duty-of-care and compliance failure

Duty of care is not a marketing phrase. It is an obligation, and corporate travel teams increasingly treat it as a measurable program, not a vague intention.
ISO 31030 pushes organizations toward demonstrable travel risk management practices, including communication and incident response structures.

If your traveler is unreachable, you do not just lose convenience. You lose confidence in your ability to locate, support, and respond.

Why consumer travel eSIMs do not solve enterprise risk

Let’s be honest: consumer travel eSIMs are amazing for consumers. For many frequent travelers, they are the first real escape from roaming bill shock and airport SIM kiosks.

But enterprise risk management has different requirements:

• Central visibility: IT and travel teams need to see usage, costs, and status across a fleet, not one phone at a time.
• Policy control: you often need to restrict usage to business apps, VPN, or approved services.
• Support: travelers need help before it breaks, not a ticket queue after it breaks.
• Resilience: “one network partner in that country” is not a resilience plan.

This is why enterprise-grade connectivity is splitting into its own category, separate from consumer travel eSIM. The market is starting to treat eSIM less like a purchase and more like infrastructure: something you deploy, manage, monitor, and audit.

You can see the same pattern in IoT, where standards like GSMA’s SGP.32 define architectures and requirements for eSIM management at scale, signaling that remote provisioning and lifecycle management are now foundational.

In plain language: when your connectivity is a fleet problem, you need fleet-grade tools.

Where SureSIM fits: connectivity as a control layer, not a perk

This is where SureSIM is genuinely interesting, because it is positioned the way enterprises actually need: not as “cheap data abroad,” but as controlled, resilient connectivity that reduces operational risk.

SureSIM describes itself as an enterprise eSIM and mobile data management platform designed for IT teams to deliver global connectivity and support.
Two parts matter here:

• Multi-network resilience: SureSIM Protect is built as a multi-network backup eSIM, designed to keep business travelers connected when the primary network fails, explicitly framing it in duty-of-care and ISO 31030 terms.
• Control and visibility: their platform emphasizes near real-time usage and cost data, proactive controls, and integration into enterprise mobility tooling (including MDM and Microsoft Intune).

This is the difference between “a traveler bought an eSIM” and “the company deployed a connectivity control.”

It also changes behavior. When travelers know they have a reliable fallback, they stop improvising. And when IT can see usage and enforce policy, you reduce the two silent killers of travel connectivity: unmanaged spend and unmanaged risk.

SureSIM also claims certifications like ISO 27001 and positions Protect as an “always there” second network on corporate and BYOD phones, ready when the primary service drops.
That framing is not cosmetic. It is risk language.

What this looks like in practice

Pre-trip

• Test and activate eSIM profiles before departure
• Set policies (open access vs business-restricted profiles)
• Make support proactive, not reactive

In-trip

• Resilient coverage via multi-network access
• Real-time monitoring and cost control
• Fewer emergency tickets because fewer surprises

Post-trip

• Review usage patterns and failures
• Tighten policy where needed
• Build evidence for governance and duty of care programs

If you are building a travel risk management program that you can actually defend in front of leadership, these are the kinds of controls that stop feeling “nice to have.”

Conclusion: Connectivity is becoming a governance topic

The market trend is clear: enterprise mobility is absorbing connectivity the way finance absorbed expense management. First, it was messy and individual. Then it became standardized. Then it became auditable.

We are now in the auditable phase.

ISO 31030 has helped formalize expectations for travel risk management in policy, communication, and response.
Security frameworks like NIST keep reminding organizations that response speed and coordinated processes reduce impact when things go wrong.
And the eSIM ecosystem is maturing into lifecycle standards like SGP.32 for scaled provisioning and management.

So here is the real conclusion, not a summary: the best enterprise connectivity strategy in 2026 is the one that makes connectivity boring again. Predictable. Managed. Governed. Something your travelers stop thinking about, and your risk team can finally stop worrying about.

Consumer travel eSIMs will keep winning on convenience and price for individuals. Traditional roaming will keep existing because inertia is powerful. But for companies that actually care about continuity, duty of care, and control, the “enterprise eSIM platform” category is the direction of travel.

SureSIM sits very cleanly in that direction, because it treats connectivity as a business control layer: resilient multi-network access, centralized management, and policy-driven oversight.

In other words, if your business depends on people being reachable, your connectivity should be designed like a risk control, not bought like a travel accessory.