Part 3 of 5: Rethinking Control in the Era of eSIM

Every enterprise carries the weight of legacy technical debt. Yet for decades, the technology industry has promoted a familiar narrative: replace the old, embrace the new, and value will follow. Refresh cycles are celebrated. Migration is overlooked.

Across IoT and edge environments, that thinking is finally being challenged.

Enterprise CIOs, CISOs, and procurement leaders are no longer interested in “rip and replace” strategies that increase risk, disrupt operations, and fragment control. Instead, they are demanding something far more pragmatic and powerful: controlled migration. eSIM represents the future of device connectivity—but it also represents a defining test of whether organizations can modernize without compounding operational debt.

eSIM adoption is not a clean break from the past. It is an evolution that must coexist with today’s reality.

The future arrives in a brownfield of devices and operations

By 2026, eSIM—driven by GSMA SGP.32—will accelerate rapidly across enterprise IoT deployments. The demand is real, and the benefits are compelling: reduced vendor lock-in, dynamic carrier selection, and greater resilience at the network edge.

What is often underestimated is the scale of coexistence required. eSIM-enabled devices will be introduced alongside millions of existing SIM-based devices already deployed across industries such as automotive, utilities, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, and smart infrastructure. These devices will not be retired on a synchronized timeline. Many are mission-critical, long-lived, and tightly regulated.

As a result, eSIMs must operate in parallel with traditional SIMs for the foreseeable future.

New eSIM-enabled devices will not arrive into greenfield environments. They will be deployed into estates already composed of traditional SIMs, legacy eSIM implementations, multiple carrier platforms, and years of accumulated complexity. This is how technical debt is created—not through innovation itself, but through unmanaged coexistence.

Buying eSIMs is not the same as adopting eSIM. Execution depends on willing mobile network operators, platform maturity, and—most critically—the enterprise’s ability to maintain control across its entire device estate. After all, nothing defines your future state more clearly than how well you govern the present one.

Mixed estates are the default

For most enterprises, mixed SIM and eSIM estates are not a temporary condition—they are the long-term operating model.

Without intentional orchestration, organizations end up managing two fundamentally different worlds. One is SIM-centric and connection-focused. The other is eSIM-centric and profile-driven. Each comes with its own workflows, tools, and failure modes.

Over time, this separation drives higher operational costs, slower fault resolution, inconsistent reporting, and reduced ability to optimize connectivity at scale. From a security perspective, fragmented visibility undermines governance at precisely the moment when connectivity itself is becoming a control plane.

The assumption must be clear: brownfield and greenfield devices—often numbering in the millions—will coexist indefinitely. Planning for anything else introduces risk.

One estate, one operating model

Managing SIMs and eSIMs as a single estate delivers immediate and strategic benefits.

Unified orchestration enables consistent monitoring across all devices, regardless of form factor or connectivity type. Fault resolution improves because device history, profile changes, and performance data are visible in one system of record. Reporting becomes authoritative rather than reconciled across disconnected tools.

More importantly, the existing SIM estate becomes a source of intelligence—not technical baggage. Coverage gaps, roaming behavior, cost drivers, and failure patterns observed today should inform how eSIM devices are governed tomorrow. Migration without learning is simply repetition at scale.

This unified data foundation is also essential for AI-driven optimization. Predictive models require whole-estate visibility to detect patterns, anticipate failures, and automate connectivity decisions. Fragmented estates produce fragmented outcomes.

eSIM changes the operational equation

SGP.32 shifts connectivity from a SIM-centric model to an enterprise-centric one. That shift introduces flexibility—but also new operational responsibilities that leaders must address explicitly.

Connectivity can no longer serve as a static device identifier. Devices may change profiles, carriers, or networks many times over their lifecycle, requiring a persistent and auditable identity model. Connectivity migration becomes a repeatable workflow, not a one-time event, and demands validation to ensure expected behavior post-change.

Power consumption becomes a strategic concern, as profile changes impact battery life. Multi-SIM and multi-eSIM devices further compound complexity. Without a common orchestration layer, these variables quickly become unmanageable.

And throughout it all, connectivity remains inseparable from security. Weak governance at the connectivity layer introduces systemic risk.

What executive leaders should mandate

eSIM adoption should never be treated as a procurement decision or a narrow technical upgrade. It is an enterprise migration that touches identity, security, workflows, testing, and long-term device performance. When mishandled, the consequences impact revenue, customer trust, and operational resilience.

CIOs, CISOs, and technology leaders should mandate common SIM and eSIM orchestration as a foundational capability. This includes unified identity management, consistent migration workflows, estate-wide monitoring, and policy-driven automation.

Only then can organizations unlock the promise of eSIM—at industry scale—without increasing fragmentation or operational debt.

Common orchestration will remain a necessity 

As the device landscape multiplies by a factor of 8x in the coming years, work will be redefined greatly.  Timely interrogation and unified, tailored governance will be essential to guarantee secure and productive operations.  A SPoG platform that unifies control and makes connectivity the new control plane for distributed networking security is instrumental. 

In the next post in this series, we examine eSIM Management vs eSIM orchestration.