Optimizing your enterprise connectivity plan for cost control, reliability, and security

Traditional connectivity provision models are failing modern enterprises, leading to unpredictable costs and security risks. This article looks at the new paradigms for global connectivity that eliminates roaming fees and plan breakage, and how 1GLOBAL is future-proofing most essential business connectivity operations. 

Demand surpassing performance  

Until very recently (in global economic terms) what a business did and how it communicated were separate concerns. There was the possibility of a gap between an organization’s performance and the degree to which its telco tools were prioritized at the most senior, strategic level.  

This operational tolerance was maintained by lower-mobility workforces and business platforms basically being the same as the ones used by consumers –  such as voice landlines, fax, and email.         

The paradigm has profoundly shifted and a business’s capacity to innovate, respond to market dynamics, and achieve scalable growth is directly linked to the performance of its connectivity infrastructure. Robust connectivity was a competitive advantage; now it’s a prerequisite for keeping the doors open and the lights on.  

The digital transformation that even now continues to reshape business is being powered by an unprecedented surge in data consumption.  

To get an idea of the escalating pace of change, at the turn of the millennium the global data traffic was about 0.0009 zettabytes. By 2015, the volume created and consumed worldwide was 15 zettabytes. By the end of 2025, that figure will be around 182 zettabytes. That’s a 12-fold increase in just 15 years. 

This forces a critical question upon every enterprise leader: is your digital infrastructure at least 12 times more capable than it was when Uptown Funk by Bruno Mars was #1 in the charts?

For most organizations, the answer reveals a significant gap between demand and capability.  

Every credible market analyst and metric has recognized connectivity as the keystone of modern commerce. Cloud infrastructure investment in 2024 surpassed €690 billion, and network operator CAPEX went over €575 billion, driven primarily by investment in 5G, fibre optic, and data centres.  

These investments are not simple maintenance or keeping pace  – they’re core to the daily processes of modern enterprise. Cloud-based phone systems, ubiquitous video conferencing, the normalization of hybrid work, and the exponential growth in file sizes all place immense demands on a corporate data ecosphere.    

This dependency means that business operations are now, in essence, network operations. A failure in connectivity is no longer a siloed problem over which to send a grumpy ticket down to IT, but a business-wide catastrophe that halts productivity and revenue. 

Outdated connectivity models and legacy network hardware, designed for centralized static offices and simpler data needs, are simply no longer fit for purpose. They represent a critical vulnerability, leading to network frustrations, cascading productivity losses, and a measurable decline in operational capacity.  

The challenge is not merely about bandwidth. It’s about finding new, smart approaches to connectivity that can handle the complexity, distribution, and scale of today's global business obligations.    

Cost, complexity, and risk 

As connectivity becomes increasingly top-of-mind for professionals, so does awareness of the consequences of failure. Inadequate or insecure connectivity is not an inconvenience, but understood as a threat to an organization's health, brand reputation, and long-term competitiveness.  

A viable enterprise’s strategy stands on four pillars of cybersecurity, scalability, downtime, and compliance.    

• Cybersecurity 

  1GLOBAL are experts in telco cybersecurity, and we’ve an excellent primer on the subject here. For the sake of this article, it’s useful to focus on the cybersecurity issues created by the proliferation and sheer diversity of connected devices within the average corporate network. From standard company-issued laptops and smartphones to vast fleets of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, each and every one expands the attack surface available for bad actors. With the growing sophistication of cybercrime, organizations are now obligated to adopt proactive and predictive security postures that minimize their network exposure, regardless of where it’s accessed from.    

• Scalability 

  Second, modern business networks demand scalability. Enterprises need the scope to scale resources up or down, support new applications, and connect distributed workforces seamlessly. This trend is not simply a market pressure, where businesses and organizations must respond quickly to fluctuating demand. It’s also being driven by businesses themselves, as increasingly sophisticated architecture enables network functions and hardware to be replaced by massively more cost-effective ‘as a service’, on-demand, cloud-based solutions. The critical challenge lies in integrating this scalability and agility without compromising the integrity of the network's security.    

• Downtime 

  The third pillar depends on mitigating downtime and service disruption. The 2024 outage related to a CrowdStrike software update crashed millions of POS systems and inflicted an estimated €9.5 billion in economic damage worldwide. This kind of figure underscores that high availability, robust disaster resilience and in-depth failover backup strategies are no longer optional but are essential for business continuity.    

• Compliance 

  Finally, the challenges posed by maintaining a legally compliant telecoms ecosphere can be daunting, and doubly so for any businesses operating in regulated industries such as financial services. Both legacy and emergent issues, such as AI and platform proliferation, mean that organizations must ensure that their entire IT infrastructure, including the connections used by employees working from home or traveling internationally, remain robustly compliant with complex and evolving legal frameworks.

Failure to adequately address any of these challenges will virtually guarantee negative consequences extending far beyond whatever the initial incident turns out to be. The short-term financial cost of a data breach is already enormous, with IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2024 report putting it at an average of €4.2 million for most businesses, and higher, at €5.2 million, for financial firms.  

These costs are just the immediate ones, which under frameworks like GDPR can amount to 4% of global annual revenue, plus the legal settlements, customer notification expenses, and the high cost of incident response.  What’s potentially far more expensive is the long-term erosion of brand reputation and customer trust. 

Reputational harm has a long half-life, and the same IBM report indicates that half of the total costs associated with a data breach are incurred in the second year and beyond, as the business struggles to rebuild its market standing.  

This leads to a state of lost competitiveness, where connectivity issues and security incidents not only disrupt current operations but also delay future technology deployments, hinder innovation, and ultimately lose ground to more agile and resilient competitors.    

Compromising capability and control  

To optimize the costs and mitigate the complexities of mobile connectivity, enterprises have traditionally been funnelled into a choice between the two classic billing models of post-paid and pre-paid.  

Unsurprisingly for a model based on decades-old paradigms, neither option in its conventional form is ideal for the dynamic needs of modern business. Instead, they force a compromise between capability and control, leading to cost inefficiencies, administrative burden, and strategic vulnerabilities. 

Features at a cost 

Post-paid plans, where a customer is billed at the end of a cycle for services consumed, have long been the standard for corporate clients.  

Their appeal often comes from an added suite of productively features, higher data allowances, network availability, and bundled international SIMs or roaming minutes for traveling employees.  

Post-paid also means consolidated monthly billing, which simplifies expense tracking for large teams, and can include options for financing new devices.    

However, these plans have traditionally come at a premium and with their own drawbacks, primarily their rigidity. Post-paid typically locks businesses into long-term contracts with substantial early termination fees. This lack of flexibility is a major hindrance for any business that seeks to be responsive to a dynamic market or has fluid staffing needs.  

Counter-intuitively, one of the common problems of classic post-paid models is unpredictability. Despite the promise of a fixed monthly rate, many businesses regularly find invoices inflated by taxes, fees, and charges for exceeding data limits or using services outside their plan's scope.  

International roaming in particular has long been a source of ‘bill shock’. This model also introduces significant administrative overheads, requiring internal staff to manage complex contracts, scrutinize bills for errors, and deal with carrier support that can be notoriously inefficient.  

From a sophisticated multinational enterprise, down to the individual private user, everyone’s familiar with getting bigger mobile bills than they expected. 

Control with compromise 

The alternative to the rigidity and surprising unpredictability of post-paid plans are pre-paid models. The primary advantage typically being absolute budget control, as paying for services in advance should provide a high degree of cost transparency. This model offers greater flexibility, as there’s no long-term commitment, thus the freedom to change or cancel services at any time without penalty. For smaller businesses or those able to accurately model their seasonal or project-based work, this adaptability is good for the bottom line.    

This control, however, has always been achieved through significant compromise on performance and features. Pre-paid users regularly face reprioritization during network congestion, smaller data allowances, and plans usually lack enterprise-grade features such as international roaming or dedicated customer support. Past a certain organizational size, the operational model itself becomes a burden, as manually topping up or authorizing credit for each individual employee is cumbersome.  

One of the most significant yet least understood drawbacks of the traditional pre-paid model is the factor of ‘breakage’.    

Understanding and eliminating Breakage 

While enterprises understandably focus on the line items of their connectivity spend, one of the greater costs often goes unnoticed in the form of plan breakage.  

Breakage is the unused portion of a pre-paid service that a customer pays for but doesn’t use before it expires. In the context of enterprise mobile plans, this translates directly into paying for data that’s never used by employees.  

This is a feature and not a bug of the pre-paid system, as it generates ‘pure’ profit for telecom providers.  What exactly breakage costs businesses incur each year is not a figure that the industry is keen to calculate, but we can get an idea of the scale by comparing it to the gift card industry, which works on an identical model.  

In 2023 year, the American gift card market was valued at $304 billion by Data Bridge Market Research, while comparison service Bankrate found that 47% of U.S. adults had at least one unspent gift card or voucher with an average value of $187, adding up to a total of $23 billion that the card issuers got to keep.

Considering that Business Research Insights put the global prepaid telecom services market for the same year at approximately $120 billion, a comparable rate would suggest that breakage is costing enterprises at least $9 billion every year.  

While businesses are thriftier that people, enterprise suffers more than individuals because breakage is averaged across the whole organization. Usage patterns across a workforce will vary, as some employees will be heavy data users, while others will use little. If each employee has a static, individual data allowance, it becomes a statistical certainty that a significant portion of total purchased data will go unused across the organization every single month.  

A few gigabytes of breakage on one line (or a few dollars on the gift card) may seem trivial, but when multiplied across a multinational workforce through a whole financial year this cumulative loss becomes a substantial and completely unnecessary drain on the corporate budget. 

Breakage, while not fraudulent, is certainly the byproduct of deeply inefficient and unintelligent legacy models. It highlights the inadequacy of static, user-by-user connectivity plans. Under the same traditional billing models, high-volume users on a field sales team might exhaust their allowance and have their access throttled while an office-based employee's data allowance goes almost entirely to waste.  

This is a lose-lose situation for the enterprise, which pays for both the throttled sales teams’ lost efficiency and the static employee's unused data. This inability to dynamically allocate a paid-for resource to the parts of the organization where it’s actually needed would have been considered unacceptable had it been a more obvious and tangible substance, such as printer ink.  

Eliminating this structural inefficiency is an essential step in optimizing enterprise connectivity costs. 

The next-gen enterprise solution 

These bundled challenges, from a data bottleneck and unacceptable security risks to old, flawed models of post-pay and pre-pay, necessitated a fundamental rethinking of how enterprise connects.  

As the only truly global mobile network provider and an eSIM pioneer, 1GLOBAL has unique experience of empowering businesses to connect their people, devices, and networks instantly, anywhere, and at scale. It was by leveraging this expertise and insight that we built the 1GLOBAL Enterprise and SmartEnterprise solutions.  Together, they’re the definitive answer to the systemic inefficiencies of legacy connectivity models.  

SmartEnterprise Prepaid 

SmartEnterprise is a hyper-scalable, eSIM-enabled shared data plan conceived specifically for the needs of international organizations. It delivers borderless 4G and 5G connectivity across more than 160 countries, truly transparent budgeting and complete administrative control. It also eliminates breakage.  

It achieves this by intelligently combining the best attributes of both pre- and post-paid models into a single, cohesive system, eradicating the trade-off between budgetary control and enterprise-grade capability. 

This is the first prepaid model of its kind that provides full cost predictability. SmartEnterprise plans operate with no hidden fee, no extra charges, and no surprise add-ons, allowing finance departments to manage their budgets with confidence and to avoid bill shock. This provides the strict cost control that businesses demand without compromising on utility.    

The critical innovation that empowers SmartEnterprise to tackle breakage is its use of a shared data pool. Instead of assigning a fixed, static data allowance to each employee, the entire organization draws from a single, collective pool of data. This is the antidote to breakage, as data is no longer stranded and wasted in the accounts of low-usage teams. Instead, it flows dynamically to the parts of the organization that need it most at any given time. This ensures that the organization gets the maximum use of the data it purchases, transforming connectivity from a perishable good into a fluid asset.  

SmartEnterprise for global business  

SmartEnterprise eliminates one of the largest sources of cost unpredictability for organizations in the form of international roaming fees. These business plans include high-speed 5G and 4G connectivity across more than 160 countries with no steep roaming charges.  

An employee can travel across multiple continents, and their device will simply connect to the best available local network as part of their single, unified plan. This is achieved through a single contract that covers the organization's entire global footprint, drastically reducing the accounting overhead and administrative complexity associated with managing multiple international carriers.  

1GLOBAL Enterprise Postpaid 

While the SmartEnterprise solution provides a revolutionary prepaid model for data, 1GLOBAL recognizes that the connectivity requirements of global enterprises can be incredibly diverse.  

To address this, 1GLOBAL Enterprise offers a custom-built, postpaid solution that include personalized Voice, SMS, and Data bundles in 190+ countries. This approach provides a comprehensive connectivity ecosystem, ensuring that every aspect of a business's communication needs, from data-heavy applications to traditional voice calls and messaging, is covered under a single, unified framework.    

Businesses can select from a range of flexible plan sizes and create custom bundles tailored to the specific requirements of different roles and teams within the organization. This eliminates the common enterprise dilemma of either overpaying for excessive, one-size-fits-all packages or leaving employees with insufficient provision.  

These post-pay plans are delivered with the same commitment to simplicity and global reach that defines SmartEnterprise and the entire 1GLOBAL brand. All services are consolidated under a single billing agreement for worldwide use, dramatically cutting down on administrative overhead and simplifying accounting processes. Crucially, these powerful, customized plans are offered without the burden of long-term commitments, giving businesses the agility to adapt as their needs evolve.  

This combination of personalized service, global coverage, and contractual flexibility makes 1GLOBAL Enterprise postpaid the solution for any organization looking to solidify a truly scalable and efficient global connectivity strategy.    

Cost, complexity, and risk revisited  

While the cost effectiveness detailed above is an obvious benefit of 1GLOBAL Enterprise and SmartEnterprise, both solutions go further with transformative advantages to the previously mentioned four pillars of cybersecurity, scalability, downtime, and compliance.    

Zero Trust security 
Enterprise and SmartEnterprise are protected by 1GLOBAL security built on Zero Trust architecture, which operating on the maxim of "never trust, always verify." It assumes no implicit trust network-wide and requires continuous automated authentication for mobile connectivity across every user and device, regardless of location. This approach minimizes the network's attack surface, providing a proactive defence against data breach and ensuring corporate data is protected everywhere inside the digital ecosphere. 

eSIM scalability 
Both Enterprise and SmartEnterprise leverage eSIM technology to replace physical SIMs, allowing instant remote connectivity deployment through Mobile Device Management (MDM) platforms or a simple QR code scan. This massively streamlines global onboarding, supports Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, and can act as a backup connection for POS systems. Inherently more secure, eSIMs reduce the risk of theft or cloning and provide a safer alternative to unsecured public Wi-Fi. 

'One Core' availability 
1GLOBAL's unique 'one core' architecture unites over 600 carriers into a single global network, providing seamless connectivity for both Enterprise and SmartEnterprise around the world. A key advantage is its resilience, as agreements with multiple local carriers means that the network enables automatic carrier failover. Devices seamlessly switch to the strongest available signal, eliminating downtime and ensuring constant, reliable connectivity. 

Compliance Control 
1GLOBAL provides centralized tools giving IT departments complete control over their global fleet from a single interface. This streamlines Enterprise and SmartEnterprise management and simplifies regulatory compliance by routing all mobile traffic through one provider. This automation frees IT resources from administrative tasks, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives that drive business growth and staying on the right side of operational jurisdictions. 

Future-proofing enterprise connectivity  

The exponential growth of data demand, the decentralization of the workforce, and the escalating stakes of cybersecurity and downtime have rendered old connectivity models obsolete. Enterprises-tier business can no longer afford the unpredictable costs and contractual rigidity of traditional pre-and post-pay plans, nor accept the performance compromises and wasteful breakage of conventional solutions.  

1GLOBAL's Enterprise and SmartEnterprise solutions dismantle the old compromises, offering a platform that delivers on every critical enterprise requirement. In a market where agile, secure, and reliable connectivity is the primary engine of productivity and growth, the choice of a trusted telco partner has become a decision of core strategic importance.

Make 1GLOBAL that trusted partner – get in touch with us today.