Microsoft Corp has what may sound like a counter-intuitive request: Please try to hack into Azure more often.

The company isn’t encouraging malicious attacks but it does want security researchers to spend more time poking holes in its flagship cloud service so the company can learn about flaws and fix them.

Many so-called White Hat hackers do this for the company’s older products like Windows, Office and browsers, but there aren’t enough working on Azure, said Kymberlee Price, who oversees community programmes in Microsoft’s Security Response Center. The company is planning several steps to change that, including explicitly stating it won’t take legal action against researchers and creating a game-like reward system that gives successful bug-finders perks and bragging rights.

Microsoft currently offers bug bounty payments for Azure, but “it’s just not getting as much activity as I would like to see”, Price added.

It’s an issue Microsoft needs to worry about as it bets big on cloud services for revenue growth. The shift to cloud computing is changing cybersecurity, providing new opportunities and new challenges. One of the biggest risks is that Microsoft now runs services for customers in its cloud, which means the software giant is on the hook to protect them.

Microsoft is planning to release what’s called a Safe Harbour statement giving researchers legal clearance to report a vulnerability. “We’ve always done that but we’ve never formally articulated it,” Price said. It’s important to publish a formal policy as researchers work more on cloud systems where they may worry they’ll accidentally knock a service offline or access customer data and get in trouble, she said.

In her first stint at Microsoft in the 2000s, Price was one of the security engineers pioneering the company’s effort to collaborate with security researchers, rather than viewing them as adversaries. She left in 2009 and returned a little more than two years ago.

Right now attackers still target networks located at a company’s own offices more frequently than the cloud, but that’s changing, said Azure chief technology officer Mark Russinovich. “The level of sophistication of the attackers and the interest in (attacking) the cloud just continues to grow as the cloud continues to grow,” he added.

Cloud security requires new tools and techniques but it also enables companies like Microsoft to track and analyse vast amounts of data to find malicious actors and scan networks of hundreds of thousands of customers so it can see attacks materialise.

Russinovich spoke about protecting the cloud at an academic conference at Microsoft attended by hundreds of Microsoft workers and security engineers from Amazon Web Services, Google, Nike Inc. and others. The event grew out of a trail-running group that includes Microsoft’s Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, who oversees a team of engineers who apply machine-learning to cybersecurity, and peers at AWS and Google. The group would often share techniques and research while on the trail and the idea for a formal conference to exchange ideas was born.

The hope is that sharing data, tools and techniques publicly will help everyone better fend off attackers. As long as private customer information is protected, Microsoft wants to share security data, said Steve Dispensa, general manager, cloud and AI security at Microsoft.

“The idea that we’re smarter than the attackers is a malignant myth – they know before we do where the weak spot is,” he said. “We publish data, we all learn, a rising tide lifts all boats.” – Bloomberg

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One of the most surefire ways to reach a potential customer base is through social media. By maintaining a steady presence on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, marketers have been able to engage with audiences in more intimate — and ultimately productive — ways than ever before.

As helpful as social media has been to marketers, however, managing multiple accounts to promote social engagement can be a lot to handle. From regularly responding to users reaching out to your brand to posting interesting and shareable content, taking care of a company’s social accounts is quickly becoming a full-time job in and of itself.

This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in. With current and developing AI technology, it’s becoming easier and more effective than ever before to promote social engagement with your customers. Here are some ways your organization can use artificial intelligence to create a stronger and more efficient social media presence to promote social engagement.

Customer Information Gathering

Big data is a rapidly evolving and growing industry, with 2.7 zettabytes of data out there today. A lot of this information has to do with Internet users’ personal characteristics and habits: a goldmine for marketers looking to increase social engagement with their brand.

Big data sources can provide searchers with relevant information about a company’s potential customer base, including information about a customer’s shopping habits, spending potential, likes and dislikes, and more. With this information, marketers can create and share content that’s relevant to customer interests, making it more likely that audiences will interact with the content — and, resultantly, the business — on social media.

The trouble is, big data sources are exactly that: big. The vastness of information available is easily overwhelming for even the most tech savvy marketers, which makes it difficult to pull out relative and useful information. To make things even more complicated, oftentimes this data comes in different formats, making them difficult to compile and compare.

Luckily, artificial intelligence technologies can quickly and accurately mine big data sources, pulling out the most relevant information about customers, reconciling different sources, and presenting the information in an understandable format. This way, marketers can efficiently get the most important data about customers and present content to them that will most likely get them engaged with the brand.

Content Curation

On a similar tangent, posting relevant and interesting content on social media platforms is one of the most effective ways to boost social engagement with your brand. In fact, B2B marketers allocate 28% of their total marketing budget, on average, to content marketing.

Content helps increase social engagement because it’s shareable and provides easy entry points to your brand; for instance, many users began to interact with the companyTasty’s social media profiles after seeing one of their viral recipe GIFs online. The more applicable the content is to a person’s interests and the trends of the day, the more likely it is that the person will then engage with the producer of that content on social media.

AI can help with this aspect of drawing in more engagement, as well. There are several AI tools out there that identify effective content in terms of social engagement, curating pieces of content that will most likely engage audiences. In other words, you can use artificial intelligence to figure out what types of content work, and curate that content to align with your brand message and promote engagement with customers on social media.

Automated Social Media Management

Now that social media platforms have grown more popular — Instagram has 700 million monthly active users, for instance – it’s getting more and more difficult to catch people’s attention and promote social engagement due to oversaturated news feeds. Many marketers overcome this by spending significant resources on buying reach like boosting Facebook posts, which can make social media management pretty expensive.

Due to this, social media managers are beginning to use AI automation tools like IFTTT to help with their accounts. With these tools, organizations can automate the posting of specific pieces of content or even interactions with other users. Certain tools are even able to search out strong content and automatically relay it to your subscribers, easily promoting social engagement without significant resource usage.

At this point, it appears that the popularity of social media is here to stay, which makes it all the more important to boost social engagement to increase your number of potential customers. By enlisting the help of artificial intelligence technology, you’ll be well on your way to growth hacking social engagement for your organization.

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