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LAS VEGAS - By 2025, employees of tech giant Oracle will no longer log into the American company’s systems using passwords. “They are just not secure,” said Oracle chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison. The 80-year-old pointed this out in his keynote address on Sept 10 at the Oracle CloudWorld conference held at the Venetian Convention and Expo Centre in Las Vegas. Describing the use of passwords as obsolete and “very dangerous”, he said the complicated requirements of modern passwords – requiring a mix of special characters and numbers in addition to letters – mean users often write passwords down and reuse them, leading to such passwords being stolen and sold. Stolen passwords are increasingly responsible for data breaches. According to an IBM report, its incident response team saw a 71 per cent increase in the number of attacks using stolen log-in credentials in 2023, compared with the year before. Mr Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder and former chief executive, said his company’s staff – who number more than 150,000 worldwide – will instead use artificial intelligence-powered biometric authentication, which includes methods such as facial and fingerprint recognition. This is in addition to Oracle’s zero trust packet routing, which enhances security by decoupling security policies from network configurations, and is already in use in Oracle Cloud, he said. “By this time next year, Oracle employees will not be using passwords,” he added. The annual customer event saw the announcement of a partnership between Oracle and Amazon Web Services (AWS), allowing their customers to integrate Oracle’s database technology with AWS’ cloud services. This comes after Oracle announced similar tie-ups with its rival Google Cloud earlier in 2024, following a partnership with Microsoft Azure that began in 2023. Such alliances were necessary, as while clients often relied on cloud services from multiple providers, these services often did not work well together, said Mr Ellison. “We’re entering a new phase where services on different clouds work gracefully together,” he added, describing these partnerships as the beginning of the “multi-cloud era”. He marked the occasion by appearing onstage at CloudWorld with AWS CEO Matt Garman. Mr Garman said: “What I found is that when we listen to customers and we really listen to what they’re looking for – that’s when we deliver an outstanding product.” Oracle announced on Sept 9 that its revenue stood at US$13.31 billion (S$17.4 billion) for the quarter ending Aug 31, up 8 per cent from US$12.45 billion a year ago. The 47-year-old company, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas, has been expanding its presence in South-east Asia in recent years. In July, Oracle launched in Singapore as part of efforts to meet the rapidly growing demand for AI and cloud services. This comes after the company – a term referring to a cluster of data centres – in the Republic in 2021. The two regions in Singapore allow organisations to strengthen their business continuity, while meeting the Republic’s data residency as well as sovereignty requirements, the company said in July. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure aims to run all its global operations – including data centres – on 100 per cent renewable energy by 2025, with the goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.