Sigve Brekke, President and CEO of Telenor Group (L), and Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO of Cisco (R). Source: Cisco

Cisco and Norway-based telecom giant Telenor re-upped a long-standing agreement to develop new as-a-service business opportunities and research tied to cybersecurity, multicloud use cases, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues.

The cybersecurity work is targeted at developing as-a-service products that can be more easily deployed and scaled. This work builds on Cisco’s growing security portfolio, which includes acquisitions of Valtrix, Kenna Security, Portshift, Sentryo, Duo Security, Observable Networks, and CloudLock.

The cybersecurity efforts also tie into the multicloud work in providing enterprise customers with designs on how to better integrate those services into their operations. This will focus on more efficient use of as-a-service products like end-to-end orchestration, observability, cybersecurity, and resource optimization.

The work will build on Telenor’s Security Touch-Free Operations initiative that uses automation to reduce cybersecurity threat response times. Telenor and Cisco will expand that work in Telenor’s Grameenphone operations in Bangladesh.

The two firms are also combining their ESG efforts, with a specific focus on digital skills and inclusion, safe connectivity, youth empowerment and education, and sustainability. Details on that work was sparse, but both have been public with ESG reporting.

Cisco, for instance, late last year released its 17th annual ESG report.

The combined efforts will be governed by a committee chaired by Cisco Networking EVP and GM Jonathan Davidson and Telenor CTO Ruza Sabanovic.

The extension, which was announced today but signed at the recent MWC Barcelona 2023 event, is the fifth such move for their joint purpose agreement that was originally signed at the MWC event in 2018.

The two had previously joined efforts on the Working Group Two (WGtwo) initiative that was founded in 2017. WGtwo’s cloud-based 5G core is offered to operators that can plug their 5G radio access network (RAN) and support systems into for seamless access. That core sits on AWS cloud infrastructure, with operators tapping into the platform through an as-a-service model.

“We’re trying to steal the business model back from the tech giants and bring them back to telecom,” WGtwo CEO Erlend Prestgard said in a recent podcast interview with SDxCentral.

Hawaii-based mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Mobi recently launched a pilot service tapping into WGtwo’s fully cloud-native core and riding on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that matches the technology sophistication of what established operators are only now just rolling out.