Hi Brad,
Thanks for the replay and sorry for my delay in updating you, after quite some time attempting many of the potential solutions you mentioned, as well as many more from various threads on the web, it turned out that the drivers for the SIM module don't all install during the initial module setup.
I thought I would post this answer to the problem as I can't believe that I am the only person who has come across this problem - and hopefully this will help someone out.
It turns out that during the process for updating the firmware, when the error displays concerning the connection to the Sahara Server, If you then go back to the windows device manager you will find two additional drivers missing, (these where not there before this) once you manually update these using the original downloaded SIMCOM drivers file and restart the firmware update process - everything works as expected.
Got there in the end, took a while but I'm now happy with the outcome and can successfully connect to the MQTT server. Thanks for your help.
Steve