The BYOD visibility gap.
BYOD is the default. Your inventory of what's actually connecting to your business isn't. Closing that gap doesn't need an MDM agent on the phone. The eSIM profile already knows.
The clean split between “corporate device” and “personal device” fell apart somewhere in the last decade, and recent data confirms how comprehensive the shift has been.
A 2024 Bitkom survey of 604 German companies put it plainly: 71% of employed people in Germany use privately-owned devices (laptops, phones, tablets) for their work. 27% of companies explicitly allow personal devices to access internal systems.
In the UK, the government's 2024 Cyber Security Breaches Survey found that 55% of businesses now have a formal policy on personal-device use for work. Among those that say they restrict access to company-issued hardware, nearly four in ten don't actually have the technical controls in place to enforce it.
Call it BYOD, call it consumerisation, call it reality. It's not an experiment anymore. It's the default.
of German employees use personal devices for work
Bitkom 2024
of UK businesses have a formal BYOD policy
UK Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2024
fewer IT FTEs needed to manage a BYOD estate
Oxford Economics for Samsung
Why we ended up here
The economics are part of it. An Oxford Economics study for Samsung put the gap between issuing devices and letting staff use their own at around $341 per employee per year. Modest on its own but material at scale. The same study found 98% of BYOD-running companies pay a stipend (averaging around $40 a month per employee), and that BYOD estates need roughly 25% fewer IT FTEs to manage. Fewer devices to procure, image, repair and replace is the line item that usually moves the decision.
The other driver isn't money. It's that people already own capable phones they've chosen, configured and know how to use. Ship someone a company handset and most of them will carry it alongside their personal phone for about a week before they stop charging it.
COVID settled any remaining debate. When supply chains broke and new hires needed to start work before a courier could deliver anything, BYOD stopped being a policy choice and started being a default.
The bit nobody talks about
Here's what doesn't show up in the headlines. When you stop issuing devices, you stop having any real record of what's connecting to your business.
You're paying for mobile connectivity on a fleet of phones you don't own, can't see and don't have a proper inventory of. Ask most IT teams which specific device each employee is using right now and they can't answer. They might know the number. They know roughly what plan it's on. Whether it's a current iPhone or a five-year-old Android that stopped getting security updates two years ago is usually a mystery until someone has a problem.
That's the BYOD blind spot. You've offloaded the procurement cost, but you've also offloaded the visibility. And visibility is where most of the insight lives.
How eSIM Copilot closes that gap
eSIM Copilot captures device information automatically. When an eSIM is installed on a phone, the profile reports the device back to the platform. Make, model, EID, all of it, without anyone having to fill in a spreadsheet or answer a survey. That data lives alongside the rest of your mobile estate, so you don't have to go hunting for it.
Every eSIM profile reports back its device. No agent on the phone. No survey to fill in.
Devices then get categorised automatically. iPhones group with iPhones. Older Android models get flagged. Personal devices can be tagged separately from company-issued ones, so a mixed fleet is legible at a glance instead of a guess.
Why this matters
The catch most competing tools have is that they rely on an MDM agent sitting on the device. That's a fine approach for laptops. It's a much harder sell on a personal phone, because the employee has to install something and plenty won't. eSIM Copilot doesn't need an agent. The eSIM profile itself is the source of truth.
Visibility vs blindness, side by side
Here's what the same employee's eSIM looks like through both lenses.
- A number on a bill
- Maybe the carrier
- "Probably an iPhone"
- No idea about OS version or security patch level
- No idea if the device has gone offline
- Make and model
- EID for every profile
- Ownership tag (BYOD vs corporate)
- Last-seen timestamp
- Auto-categorisation by device type and age
What you can actually do with the data
Once every device on your mobile estate is visible, the questions you can ask get a lot sharper.
These aren't hypothetical exercises. With eSIM Copilot plugged into Claude, they're one question and an answer. The categorisation is already there. The data's already there.
Why it matters for security, finance and IT
For Security
BYOD visibility is the difference between a risk you can size and one you can't. The UK Cyber Security Breaches Survey put breach rates at 50% of businesses in a single year, rising to 74% for large businesses. You can't defend what you can't see.
For Finance
Phones get lost. Employees leave. Plans carry on. If you can see which eSIMs are sitting on devices that stopped checking in months ago, you can cancel the ones nobody's using.
For IT
You can't design a sensible mobile policy, a stipend scheme or a refresh cycle if you don't know what's actually in the field.
BYOD removed the easy assumption that IT knew what was on the network. Automatic device capture is how you get that assumption back, without asking your employees to hand over their personal phones for inventory.
See what your mobile estate actually looks like.
Talk to us and we'll show you what your estate looks like through eSIM Copilot, with the device data you didn't know you already had.
Scott Mackenzie