Technology
As Wall Street Embraces the Cloud, Legacies are Forsaken
When the world was first hit with its COVID-19 case and the news hastily spread, global populations were hit with the pandemic whiplash, bursting into their comfort zones and breaking all bounders of normality. For the tech industry, however, this was not the case. As businesses were closing doors, Big Tech giants were embracing the opportunities that came with the pandemic, opportunities to take the industry to the next level, placing global economies in need of digital developments to sustain their businesses. Wall Street was one of those businesses.
Big Tech giants thrived in their endeavors, making them profoundly rich, directing the attention of the home of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to the modernized alternatives of moving money around the world through cloud computing.
Wall Street Embraces the Cloud
In the past decade, the tech industry matured to become the embodiment of what could be deemed as the colossus of digital transformation. The Big Tech giants, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, have emerged stronger from the pandemic. All that can be attributed to how their cloud computing infrastructure accelerated collaboration, communication, and online services as the world was confined within the boundaries of public safety.
In 2017, two of the most renowned financial institutions on Wall Street decided to alter the shifts between the financial sector and the tech industry. JP Morgan and ANZ Bank followed Capital One’s lead and embraced cloud computing technology to heighten their capabilities in critical aspects of the industry, such as security, scalability, and empowering multi-region support.
As the powerhouses of the tech industry, Wall Street looked upon the tech giants as valuable candidates to create the digital infrastructure it needed to modernize the way the money street conducted its transactional business while cutting costs and increasing efficiency.
Wall Street embraces a hefty amount of data on a daily basis, with some of the most influential financial institutions increasing their computing power to maintain their large capacity. But making such a big move will not come without its risks and complications. It could result in detrimental complications in analysis, surveillance, regulations, illicit money transactions, money laundering, accessing customers’ data, and customer marketing.
A move such as this for a dominant financial powerhouse such as Wall Street will put it in the spotlight, placing it under the radar of some of the most notorious cyberthreats if their cloud infrastructure is not secure enough.
Placing this much responsibility on the Big Tech giants is a clear demonstration of how the world’s leading cloud companies, such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services, have managed to emerge from the pandemic as a vital addition to the financial sector.
Building the Right Cloud Skills
Despite Wall Street’s adoption of the cloud, it is still unclear as to the which extent this will go. First, it was small establishments with a limited technology budget that sought old a less costly way of securing their data, then the larger banks followed.
A wave of Wall Street’s organizations, such as asset managers, insurance companies, and banks, are developing and altering their policies to create the needed framework for heavy masses of data and increasing their computer power to manage their businesses through the cloud.
With that stands the increased capacity not only towards less costly solutions but also adding functional capabilities to support substantial data lakes, transformation and analysis, visualization, predictions, the collaboration between companies, and much more.
The rise of serverless capabilities drove the financial industry to alter their ways of managing money by scaling the data masses to whatever volumes are needed, leaving users to be charged with only the transaction costs only for the data process, in return, canceling the server costs.
Financial institutions are fortifying their infrastructure through the cloud by building the needed cloud skills, discovering the advantages of cloud computing, and augmenting functionality levels. Wall Street’s shift will improve business value in ways traditional means could not. The need for on-premises data storage and classification will soon be a thing of the past as cloud computing will prove itself to be a dependable way of storing data on the servers.
Traditional Legacies
An estimate of 80 percent of financial transactions and 95 percent of ATM transactions were processed by a mainframe. The reliance on processed frameworks never raised issues, except how it will sustain itself against the colossal development and embrace of digital transformation.
Traditional technological legacies are just that, legacies. In order for the world, global economies, health sectors, and financial sectors worldwide to be able to deal with the acceleration in demand, they needed to make a move to the digital realm.
When the federal Paycheck Protection Program was rolled out, various banks began to notice characteristic weak points in their infrastructure, highlighting the need to modernize their tech framework.
The dependence on old technology is only because it works. Putting that aside will only underline the ever-higher need to reach new capabilities with fewer data centers that run on old technology.
In 2019, the biggest bank in the U.S., JP Morgan Chase, let go of its legacy ways and transformed its infrastructure into the cloud with three major cloud providers. AWS is one of the cloud companies that took the lead in managing such a shift after Capital One was the first to welcome cloud computing. Soon after, Gladman Sachs employed one of AWS’s senior executives to take the lead in shifting its financial framework to the cloud.
Summary
Wall Street’s financial institutions hold the keys to the cloud computing industry, and Big Tech companies are fully aware of that. The Wall Street titans, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, both got pitched by Amazon to create their cloud infrastructure, and the company won both accounts. An effort that placed Amazon in its next phase as it bursts into the walls of the home of the NYSE and could lead the company to its successive peaks or put it in its trickiest stage.
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What is biometric identification? It is the process through which unique biological characteristics are used in biometric identification to recognize and validate a person. These characteristics can be found in facial traits, eye structures, DNA, fingerprint patterns, and even handwriting. All this data that can be gathered on an individual inevitably brings up the ethical issues in biometrics that need to be addressed.
Facial recognition and fingerprint scans were previously the domain of security, and they were utilized for identification and law enforcement. However, increasingly more business and civil applications are using biometrics authentication. Due to this increased use, it is crucial to address the moral and ethical issues in biometrics when used in the creation of new application and technology.
Applied biometrics and corporate ethics have received little empirical study despite the widespread use of biometric technologies. As a result, there is plenty of room for future study to help us better comprehend the moral consequences of adopting this technology.
This article examines the ethical concerns associated with the use of biometric technology on the use of biometrics for non-security applications as well as the moral ramifications for business.
Ethical Issues in Biometrics and Privacy
Biometric data takes privacy concerns to a whole new level that typical data gathering only touches on. Digital identities can be forged, and anonymity on the web can be maintained to a degree if you know how. Also, digital data can be deleted – if we forget that Meta (Facebook) has been revealed to store deleted data, which is an ethical concern in itself.
The problem with biometric data is that it is unforgeable, unconcealable, and permanent, You can’t change your eye structure, your fingerprint, or your facial features. Big tech companies already have your face, fingerprints, and your voice recorded and stored via current biometric authentication systems – mainly used for unlocking your phone. That data will be there forever, and there is little that people can do about it besides avoid it In the first place.
While many companies still give users the option of using a good old fashion passcode to unlock their phones, as technology as a whole tends to do, the biometric alternative is slowly gaining more traction, and will one day become the norm, as it is hard to argue its convenience and security. You can’t accidentally leave your eyeball at home or forget your fingerprint. But in the same sense, you can’t change it. If your childish curiosity while browsing the web put a black spot on your record, there’s no changing that.
Therein lies the question of who if anyone should have access to such data. Today’s tech giants have all our data in their hands, that won’t change with the spread of biometric verification methods. Indeed, it will only increase targeting capabilities.
While the collection of biometric data on its own does not necessarily mean it will be shared, monetized, or abused in any way, it never the less requires clear and strict guidelines and regulations to be implemented around it. There are too many things that can be abused by the wrong party when the ethical issues in biometrics are not taken seriously, and if such limitations are not applied stringently.
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The Reno line of smartphones has always had a fantastic camera and an attractive design. The Reno 8 and 8 Pro include a 120Hz AMOLED display, the newest Dimensity chipsets, 80W fast charging, a 32-megapixel front camera, and triple 50-megapixel back cameras, among other notable features that make the Oppo Reno 8 and Reno 8 Pro high-quality yet affordable option for anyone.
Here we compare the two latest Oppo phone series iterations and see what to expect from the flagship Oppo smartphone, and how the Oppo Reno 8 and the Oppo Reno Pro stack up against each other.
Oppo Reno 8 Specifications
The Oppo Reno 8 has a smaller 6.43-inch full-HD+ AMOLED display with a resolution of 1,080 by 2,400 pixels, a 90Hz refresh rate, and Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection. It also runs Android 12 with ColorOS 12.1 on top. Additionally, the display has an 800 nits maximum brightness and a 20:09 aspect ratio. An octa-core MediaTek Dimensity 1300 SoC, up to 8GB of LPDDR4x RAM, and up to 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage are all found within the Oppo smartphone.
The Reno 8 has a triple back camera configuration for pictures and movies, with a 50-megapixel main sensor and an f/1.8 lens as its focal point. Additionally, there is a 2-megapixel macro camera with a 112-degree field of view and an 8-megapixel sensor coupled with an f/2.2 ultra-wide angle lens.
The Reno 8 offers 5G, 4G LTE, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth v5.3, GPS/A-GPS, NFC, and a USB Type-C connector as connection options. An accelerometer, light, gyroscope, magnetometer, and a proximity sensor are among the sensors on board. For biometric verification, the phone also has a fingerprint sensor hidden behind the display. A 4,500mAh battery inside the Oppo Reno 8 supports 80W Super Flash Charge quick charging. The phone weighs 179 grams and has dimensions of 160 x 73.4 x 7.67mm.
Oppo Reno 8 Pro Specifications
A 6.7-inch full-HD+ (1,080×2,412) AMOLED display with up to 120Hz refresh rate and Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection is included with the Oppo Reno 8 Pro. Running on top of Android 12 is ColorOS 12.1. Additionally, the display supports HDR10+ and is certified by Netflix HD, Amazon HDR, SGS Low Motion Blur, and SGS Low Blue Light. The MediaTek Dimensity 8100-Max SoC, which has eight cores, and up to 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM power the smartphone. Storage on the Oppo Reno 8 Pro is UFS 3.1 capable of up to 256GB.
The Oppo Reno 8 Pro boasts a triple rear camera arrangement with a 50-megapixel Sony IMX766 main sensor and an f/1.8 lens, an 8-megapixel sensor and an ultra-wide lens with an f/2.2 aperture and a 112-degree field of view, and a 2-megapixel macro camera with an f/2.4 aperture. Along with the MariSilicon X NPU, the phone’s camera will offer generally better performance in both bright and dim light. It has a 32-megapixel front-facing camera sensor with an f/2.4 lens for taking selfies and making video calls.
The phone has 5G, 4G LTE, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth v5.3, GPS/A-GPS, NFC, and a USB Type-C connector as connectivity options. An accelerometer, a light meter, a gyroscope, a magnetometer, and a proximity sensor are among the sensors built into the phone. For biometric authentication, the phone also contains a fingerprint sensor underneath the touchscreen. The smartphone has a 4,500mAh battery that supports rapid charging at 80W Super Flash Charge. The phone weighs 183 grams and has dimensions of 161 x 74.2 x 7.34mm.
Both the Oppo Reno 8 and Reno 8 Pro are prime smartphones that can fit any user’s preferences and can be considered premium smartphones on the cheaper side. If you like photography, you will be satisfied with the level of quality overall, but keep in mind that neither phone is particularly water resistant, so be careful where you take it.
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Many prefer the rumbling ‘vroom’ of a gasoline car to the soft hum of an electric vehicle, while others would rather just be satisfied in the knowledge that they are lessening their carbon footprint. Let’s look at the cold hard facts however, and compare electric cars vs gas cars
Electric Cars vs Gas Cars: Components
The amount of moving components is an important distinction between electric and gasoline-powered automobiles. While a gasoline-powered car contains hundreds of moving components, an electric vehicle just has one, the motor. Another significant distinction is that the electric car has fewer moving components. The electric car is more dependable and needs less routine maintenance. The maintenance needed for a gasoline-powered car ranges from routine oil changes, filter replacements, tune-ups, and exhaust system repairs to less frequent component replacements including water and fuel pumps, alternators, and so on.
Electric Cars vs Gas Cars: Maintenance
The expenses associated with maintaining an electric car are reduced since there are less maintenance requirements. The shaft, the only moving component of the electric motor, is extremely dependable and needs little to no maintenance. The controller and charger are electrical devices that require minimal to no maintenance because they have no moving components. Modern sealed lead acid batteries are maintenance free and utilized in electric cars nowadays. However, these batteries have a finite lifespan and will eventually need to be replaced. New batteries are being developed to increase the range of electric cars as well as the battery pack’s lifespan, perhaps eliminating the need to replace the battery pack throughout the course of the vehicle’s lifespan.
Electric Cars vs Gas Cars: Efficiency
In addition to being simpler and less expensive to repair than gasoline-powered vehicles, electric vehicles are also more cost-effective to run. The electric car will drive roughly 43 miles for $1 based on the efficiency of 3 miles/kwhr and the cost of power at 7 cents per kwhr. The gasoline-powered car will go roughly 18 miles based on the average gas mileage of 22 miles per gallon and the price of gasoline at $1.25 per gallon. As a result, an electric car may drive more than twice as far on a dollar’s worth of petrol.
Where Electric Falls Behind
There are still a number of difficulties for the owner of an electric car despite the fact that it will be less expensive to operate and maintain.
The primary issue is the restricted range offered by existing battery technology. The amount of driving distance possible utilizing the current batteries is between 50 and 150 miles. These ranges are being extended by new battery technologies, and prototypes of these batteries have shown ranges of up to 200 miles between recharging. Solar powered charging stations are being implemented in numerous places to decrease range anxiety towards electric vehicles
The lack of qualified service professionals to repair and maintain electric cars is another issue that faces their owners. A two-year associate degree program has been developed to train high school graduates to become proficient electric vehicle technicians, and training programs are being developed and made available to upgrade the conventional automotive technician with the skills needed to maintain an electric vehicle.
Infrastructure to recharge the batteries is also required. The most important component of the infrastructure for recharging already exists: electric power is accessible practically everywhere. To support the electric car, it is still necessary to guarantee that charging stations with the right sorts of service (i.e., maximum voltage and current) are placed in important areas. Plans must also be made.
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Ian Terblanche, Global Strategic Sales & Channel Director at Sigfox
