There’s a scenario that plays out more often than IT teams want to admit. A senior consultant lands in Singapore, fires up the hotel Wi-Fi, and spends two hours on VPN-less video calls before their roaming data kicks in. A field engineer in Frankfurt grabs a coffee and taps into the café network while waiting for a client meeting. A finance director, mid-flight to Dubai, queues up sensitive documents on the airport’s “complimentary” internet.

None of them thinks twice about it. And that’s exactly the problem.

Public Wi-Fi has spent two decades being treated as a minor inconvenience — slow, unreliable, occasionally annoying. But framing it as an inconvenience fundamentally misunderstands what it actually is: an uncontrolled network environment where your corporate devices operate entirely outside your security perimeter, and where someone else decides what happens to your data.

The travel security conversation in most organisations still centres on physical safety — insurance, emergency contacts, embassy numbers. Connectivity risk barely gets a mention. That gap is widening fast.

What Actually Happens on Unsecured Networks

Zimperium’s 2025 Global Mobile Threat Report found that attackers are actively shifting to a mobile-first strategy, leveraging rogue networks, social engineering, and app vulnerabilities to access sensitive corporate data. Airports, hotels, and conference venues are listed explicitly as high-value hunting grounds.

The numbers behind this aren’t theoretical. IBM’s 2024 data breach analysis put the average cost of a corporate breach at $4.88 million — a 10% year-on-year increase. A Forbes-cited study found 43% of unsecured network users have had their data compromised. And yet, 47% of Wi-Fi users admit they don’t verify the legitimacy of a hotspot before connecting.

The “evil twin” attack — where a threat actor broadcasts a fake access point mimicking a hotel or airport network name — remains one of the simplest and most effective vectors in existence. Only one in five Americans says they’re confident they could identify a false Wi-Fi network. There’s no reason to think enterprise employees fare much better.

Man-in-the-middle interception, credential harvesting, session hijacking — these aren’t advanced persistent threat operations. They’re opportunistic, low-cost, and increasingly automated. The travelling employee who defaults to public Wi-Fi because their roaming data failed or ran out is an easy mark.

The Connectivity Gap Nobody Plans For

Here’s what rarely gets addressed in travel risk policies: what happens in the twenty minutes — or two hours — between a traveller losing mobile data coverage and finding a secure alternative?

That gap is real. Roaming data can fail. Plans hit limits. SIMs don’t always switch networks cleanly in coverage black spots. And when connectivity drops, the reflex is immediate: find Wi-Fi. It’s not a calculated decision. It’s muscle memory.

This is where the security exposure isn’t just theoretical — it’s structural. The enterprise has spent significant money on endpoint security, zero-trust frameworks, MDM deployment, and VPN licensing. None of that matters if the underlying connection goes through an uncontrolled public network at the moment the employee is actively doing sensitive work.

Sideloaded apps are present on nearly 25% of enterprise devices, and one in four devices can no longer update to the latest OS— meaning the device connecting to that rogue hotspot may already be compromised before the traveller even sits down.

Duty of Care Has a Connectivity Dimension

ISO 31030 — the international standard for travel risk management — explicitly covers cyber threats among the risks organisations must identify, assess, and mitigate for travelling employees. Most companies know the standard exists. Far fewer have operationalised the connectivity component.

ISO 31030 makes clear that the duty of care extends beyond physical safety to encompass legal and moral responsibilities for employee wellbeing on the road — and that includes digital wellbeing. If an employee’s device is compromised because their company failed to provide reliable, secure mobile connectivity, the liability question becomes uncomfortable.

This is the business case that connectivity platforms have been slow to articulate, and that corporate risk teams have been equally slow to grasp. Connectivity isn’t just an operational nicety. For organisations with ISO 31030 obligations, it’s arguably a compliance requirement.

Where SureSIM Fits Into This Picture

SureSIM was built from the ground up in early 2024 specifically because no suitable enterprise-grade eSIM solution existed. That’s a significant origin story — it wasn’t a consumer product repurposed for business use, which is the uncomfortable reality behind most of the “business travel” eSIM offerings on the market today.

SureSIM Protect, the platform’s backup connectivity product, is designed to eliminate the moment of failure that leads employees to public Wi-Fi in the first place. SureSIM product provides automatic multi-network switching when primary data connections drop. It explicitly cites ISO 31030 compliance support as a core design goal, enabling businesses to maintain secure, reliable data access worldwide without barring connections or creating friction for end users.

The platform connects to over 450 mobile networks globally, provides near real-time visibility over connections, and gives IT teams direct policy control without requiring physical SIM swaps. Deployment happens over the air in minutes, with profiles configurable either for full open access or restricted business-only usage, depending on the organisation’s risk appetite.

Early adopters include Mitsubishi Corporation, which is a meaningful reference point — large multinationals with complex global footprints and genuine governance requirements don’t pilot platforms that aren’t operationally serious.

What Sets SureSIM Apart From the Pack

The enterprise eSIM space is still young enough that most of the named players are primarily consumer brands — Holafly, Airalo, Nomad, Yesim — who’ve added “business” tiers without fundamentally rethinking the product. The model is the same: self-serve QR codes, regional data bundles, and basic top-up management. That works fine for the individual traveller who wants cheap roaming data. It doesn’t work for a CISO trying to enforce data policies across 2,000 devices in 40 countries.

Ubigi and Airhub sit closer to the B2B space with API-level integrations, but they’ve historically focused on IoT and device connectivity rather than corporate workforce management. The travel management company (TMC) ecosystem — Amadeus, SAP Concur’s connectivity partnerships — remains largely disconnected from real-time SIM-level control.

SureSIM’s actual differentiator isn’t the eSIM itself. It’s the management layer: real-time policy enforcement, automated cost controls, usage visibility at the individual device level, and the ability to reassign or suspend eSIMs remotely at scale. Built by Utelize Mobile — a UK managed mobility services provider with existing enterprise relationships including Stagecoach Group and HomeServe — SureSIM had the distribution channel and IT team trust that most eSIM startups spend years trying to build.

Winning Best Enterprise IoT eSIM Product at the Mobile News Awards 2025 adds credibility, but the more important signal is product architecture. This isn’t a connectivity play with a management dashboard bolted on. It’s the reverse — a management platform that happens to run on eSIM infrastructure.

What This Market Looks Like in Two Years

The broader trend is clear: enterprise connectivity is moving from a procurement category (buy a roaming bundle, hand out SIM cards) to an IT governance category. The same shift that happened with endpoint security — from IT’s problem to the CISO’s problem — is beginning to happen with mobile data.

Forward-looking CIOs are already leveraging eSIM for multi-network resiliency, secure laptop and tablet connectivity, and real-time usage governance, with integration into Microsoft Intune emerging as a near-term expectation. That last point matters enormously. Intune integration means eSIM management sitting inside the same console as device management, app deployment, and compliance monitoring. When that happens, the question of whether to treat connectivity as a security variable stops being optional. enterprise eSIM security solution

For the public Wi-Fi problem specifically, the solution isn’t better VPNs or stronger endpoint protection — though both matter. It’s eliminating the connectivity gap that drives employees to public networks in the first place. That requires always-available, policy-controlled mobile data that follows the device regardless of geography. Which is precisely what the enterprise eSIM category, at its best, should deliver.

SureSIM is one of the few players building explicitly for that outcome. The consumer eSIM market had its moment — now the real work begins.