Why Summer Is the Ultimate Test of Your Enterprise Mobility Strategy

The Summer Slide

In educational psychology, the measurable “learning loss” children experience over the summer vacation is known as the Summer Slide. While adults rarely get to enjoy their vacations to the same extent, US organizations are often less productive in summer due to increased staff absences and reduced working hours. For IT teams and People teams, the warmer months bring a unique blend of administrative, business, and connectivity challenges. Even small businesses can suddenly find themselves managing a globally distributed workforce.

This is partly why it’s so important for IT departments to improve efficiencies where they can, and give employees the tools they need to work comfortably, even while on the go. Mobile connectivity is a clear example. When employees travel, they often need to be able to work and stay connected, wherever they are in the world.

By supplying a flexible and easy-to-use corporate roaming solution, organizations can support their teams and provide the tools to comfortably collaborate outside the office. This strategy doesn’t apply to short vacations and quick work trips. The number of workers adopting hybrid working hours and using the summer to work remotely for extended periods of weeks or months is also growing.

As employee expectations evolve in tandem with the digital tools that allow them to perform from anywhere, so too must HR and IT departments.

A more sophisticated mobile connectivity service shouldn’t mean a larger connectivity budget: eSIM technology means that organizations can now supply their employees with faster, more secure mobile connectivity while saving money on administrative overheads, accounting hours, and physical devices.

Despite the occasional CEO-penned think piece, hybrid working has no impact on individual performance – though it does improve employee satisfaction and reduce turnover by around 30%. In fact, out of all employees in remote-capable positions, more work fully remote than fully on-site.

At the same time, maintaining this employee satisfaction comes with a caveat: a growing number of remote and traveling employees need to be supported by a mobile connectivity service, ideally one that can flexibly accommodate new joiners, devices, and short-notice travel.

With summer now gripping the northern hemisphere, organizations are taking the opportunity to reconsider their current mobile connectivity strategy and explore an emerging field of new, digital-led solutions.

The traditional enterprise mobile plans dilemma

When arranging connectivity for a traveling workforce, IT departments are often left with an unwelcome choice:

• Use the same domestic carrier for traveling employees and deal with the steep international roaming charges.

• Negotiate, distribute, and manage individual roaming agreements and SIMs for every employee, in every country of operation.

The first tactic – do nothing – may seem like the simplest option, but it can quickly become financially unsustainable. Even in a company with a bottomless telecoms budget, relying on a single carrier can leave employees stranded without signal. Worse still, it can incentivize team members to connect to unsecured public Wi-Fi while travelling, exposing the company to greater risk of data breaches and cyberattacks.

Option two offers more security and avoids roaming fees, though it raises its own set of problems. Negotiating and maintaining individual roaming agreements with separate carriers in every country is a punishingly intricate task that places a severe (and entirely avoidable) strain on IT and legal departments.

Once contracts have been settled, the strategy is still limited in flexibility: if employees wish to travel at short notice to a new country, either for personal or work reasons, IT departments must organize a new roaming agreement, arrange the delivery of a SIM card, and recall the SIM when no longer needed.

Now repeat this process across multiple teams, all with differing devices and data requirements, and the scope of the challenge behind global workforce connectivity becomes clear.

The bottom line is that both strategies force companies to operate reactively to employee and business needs. In an era where mobile connectivity is an integral element of office work, companies are increasingly turning to forward-looking alternatives like eSIM-based mobile plans and Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) options.

Many organizations continue to rely on fragmented operator contracts, individual expense claims, and unpredictable roaming charges. This creates challenges for both employers and employees, who often lack visibility into costs until after travel has taken place.

Digital convenience, backed by rigorous central control

Fittingly, eSIM plans are frequently associated with vacations and travel. One of the most popular uses of the technology is the travel eSIM market, where holidaymakers purchase short-term foreign mobile data plans to get online abroad for short stints. Worth over $1.8 billion, the travel eSIM market is on course to replace short-term local SIM cards as the go-to roaming solution for international visitors.

An enterprise eSIM plan offers users the same ease-of-use as a travel eSIM, coupled with a long-term application and a comprehensive enterprise mobility management platform for IT teams to distribute and manage eSIM plans across multiple employees in different countries.

Due to their digital nature, all eSIMs across all devices in an organization can be remotely managed from one program. 1GLOBAL enterprise eSIM plans provide organizations with a single digital hub to manage all elements of their connectivity, from remotely distributing eSIMs to applying software updates and managing billing. Recent developments like Zero Touch deployment simplify this even further, enabling eSIMs to be distributed entirely remotely, with no effort required by the end-user.

To continue the summer analogy, this platform serves as a lifeguard, providing constant oversight and alerting teams to step in when needed and save the day.

This alone eliminates countless hours of administrative effort, while catalyzing organizations’ abilities to instantly provide fast, roaming-free mobile data to their teams, regardless of where they are in the world.

A centrally managed connectivity solution provides visibility, control, and predictability across the workforce. Instead of managing multiple providers and invoices, organizations can provision connectivity centrally, monitor usage in real time, and maintain a single commercial relationship regardless of where employees travel.

How BYOD has changed international business travel connectivity

As personal devices become increasingly common in enterprise environments, connectivity is no longer limited to corporate-issued hardware. Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies allow employees to use their personal devices for work purposes. Usually, this is dictated by employee preference: with a BYOD policy, users no longer have to carry around a separate work phone, and are free to work on their preferred devices.

They can also create significant cost savings for the company, slashing hardware outlays, as well as promoting a more sustainable workplace.

However, the system only works when coupled with a capable connectivity partner and rigorous security processes.

Employees want the convenience of using their preferred devices while maintaining a clear separation between personal and business usage.

Employers, meanwhile, need a way to provide connectivity without creating administrative overheads or compliance concerns. BYOD policies promise both, though only when correctly administered. Allowing the use of work-related data and programs on personal devices requires up-to-the-second security controls and remote management tools, while accounting for employee privacy and a fair work-life balance.

Deploying corporate connectivity in the chaotic summer months can seem impossible. Traveling employees need devices that:

1. Suit their personal preferences

2. Allow them to travel to new countries while remaining connected

3. Can be remotely updated with new security features

Once again, companies seemingly face two less-than-ideal scenarios: either shelling out and lumbering teams with expensive but secure work devices, or capitulating, allowing personal devices for work, and accepting the heightened financial and security risks.

The best enterprise mobility solutions benefit both sides. Employees stay connected without worrying about roaming charges or sourcing local SIMs, while IT, procurement, and finance teams gain clearer oversight of usage and spending.

According to the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, “The effectiveness of BYOD data protection depends upon how thoroughly the device can be managed,” and “how well considerations of usability have been balanced with security.”

Again, eSIMs hold the key here. In the SIM card era, any BYOD strategy still carried the risk of loss or theft of the card itself – eliminating this factor alone, coupled with the remote recall possibilities of eSIM, mitigates much of the risk of BYOD. eSIM services like 1GLOBAL Enterprise allow for the instantaneous remote management of all company eSIM profiles, enabling cybersecurity teams to remotely monitor all devices and deploy the latest security updates as required.

Another alternative is Device as a Service, or DaaS.

BYOD connectivity and Device as a Service

When the iPhone 17 was announced in 2025, it became the first eSIM-only iPhone to be sold worldwide, effectively spelling the end of the SIM card. By 2030, eSIMs are expected to be the standard SIM format worldwide, underlining the importance of a regularly updated device inventory.

One of the more recent 'aaSisms', DaaS allows companies to approach their hardware expenditure the same way they would a software, shifting the model from outright purchasing to short-term leasing and predictable recurring payments.

Rather than dropping significant capex on a fleet of mobile devices that swiftly depreciate, telecoms and technology companies like 1GLOBAL allow companies to rent fully-configured mobile devices, including the data plans and connectivity needed to allow their teams to operate around the world, while maintaining a predictable budget and only paying for the technology they use.

How 1GLOBAL simplifies summer connectivity

Inflexible mobile strategies limit employee freedom not just to work remotely from wherever they want, but also to pursue new business opportunities and arrange face-to-face meetings at short notice. Over time, this ultimately hinders international growth.

It also allows organizations to implement clear, structured remote working and employee travel policies – something that has been shown to have a significant effect on improving productivity and reducing burnout.

In most northern hemisphere countries, summer vacations are generally limited to the June-August period. Any company operating in other sectors of the globe, however, will be keenly aware of the need to accommodate varying holiday times across climates and regions. In India alone, the subcontinent’s diverse climate and federalized education system mean that summer vacation periods differ enormously from state to state.

In an increasingly globalized economy, organizations must be able to respond to these fluctuations. A reactive, static mobile connectivity policy, tied to a domestic carrier, cannot provide this.

While increased team absences during summer can impact revenue, eSIM enterprise plans mean that companies can still increase efficiency and increase revenue over the same period – they ensure that IT and accounting departments can finally relax over summer with everyone else.

Overcoming the summer slide with 1GLOBAL

1GLOBAL Enterprise plans are built with the future in mind, helping organizations to implement scalable mobile connectivity that allows teams to travel anywhere, anytime, while staying connected on any eSIM device.

Speak to an expert today to learn using a 1GLOBAL enterprise plan with your business.