Read time: 7 minutes
What’s been happening in the cloud and infrastructure sector over the last 3 months?
Our Buyer Intelligence platform has been continuously tracking first-party buyer signals across our database, bringing you timely insights in the form of our latest cloud and infrastructure intent report.
Our mission? To help tech vendors keep their demand generation strategies tightly aligned to real market demand.
Published quarterly as part of our category-specific intent reports, our latest blog takes a deeper dive into the shifts most likely to impact your cloud and infrastructure campaigns — and how you can action these insights to drive success.
Ready to level up your strategy? Let's go...
Market snapshot
Here's what our latest cloud and infrastructure intent report reveals about the current market:
- Interest is strongest in the technology, finance, and healthcare industries.
- Traction is highest among enterprises with 1,000–5,000+ employees.
- IT management, finance, and operations functions show the greatest engagement with cloud and infrastructure topics.
From insight to impact, here's how to apply our insight into your campaigns:
Targeting and segmentation action points:
1. Segment enterprise organisations in surging industries and geos (particularly NAM) into priority tiers.
2. Within these tiers, filter intent signals among trending job functions to inform topic clusters.
Why?
Segmenting your market into priority tiers helps to focus go-to-market teams on the accounts most likely to convert. Layering topic clusters against these segments allows for highly relevant, scalable content that mirrors how audiences are actually researching.
Research patterns at account level
5 hot topics dominating research in the cloud and infrastructure space (over the last 3 months), are:
- Hybrid security solutions — the most‑researched topic. Buyers want one control plane across on‑premise and cloud with consistent policies and Zero Trust segmentation.
- Cloud security — audiences are looking for CSPM/CIEM playbooks and workload‑protection patterns that clarify the shared‑responsibility model.
- Cloud cost optimisation — is now a board‑level conversation. FinOps teams expect tagging standards, rightsizing approaches, committed‑use strategies and autoscaling policies with before/after unit economics.
- Data backup & recovery — signals resilience‑first thinking. Buyers want immutability, ransomware‑ready restores and tested RPO/RTO designs.
- Cloud compliance & governance — is rising; teams need policy‑as‑code mapped to frameworks and automated evidence collection.
The topic showing the greatest decline in popularity is:
- Disaster recovery-as-a-service with a 10% MoM decrease
What do these insights mean for your content strategy?
To keep your strategy aligned to market demand, we recommend:
- Prioritising "how it works" content. Publish reference architectures, runbooks and short demos that operationalise hybrid security and cloud security in real environments. Use clear before/after diagrams and name the controls you use so readers can copy the approach.
- Make value measurable. Tie your cost content to FinOps metrics and unit economics — tagging standards, rightsizing, commitments and autoscaling — with transparent assumptions and a simple calculator so stakeholders can model impact.
- Treat backup & recovery as a resilience programme. Document immutable storage, least‑privilege access, ransomware‑ready restore paths and routine restore drills; include a checklist and drill schedule that teams can lift into their playbooks.
Pro tip: Use AI/NLP tools (topic modelling, entity extraction, semantic clustering) to audit your content library against competitor coverage. Flag underserved subtopics (e.g. cloud-native data protection, PAM for non-human identities) and build differentiated assets where demand is growing fastest.
Buyer group analysis
For cloud and infrastructure buyers, the stakes are especially high: hybrid security must be unified, costs optimised, and governance and resilience proven. Our report shows the order in which buyers prioritise these factors depend on their role and seniority.
What does this mean for your persona development?
Tailoring content to buyer role nuances is critical for engagement and conversion. Here's how you can translate these insights into accurate personas.
Persona A: Influencers and researchers (often Network Engineers or Systems Administrators)
- Concerns: preventing data security breaches, maintaining uptime, and developing in‑house cloud skills to reduce dependency on third parties.
- Content preferences: they want quick‑consumption explainers, checklists, and technical webinars focused on troubleshooting and practical application.
Persona B: Mid‑level decision makers (such as Cloud Architects, and Operations Managers)
- Concerns: managing skill shortages, minimising service downtime, and controlling high operational costs while ensuring smooth integration across systems.
- Content preferences: they seek case studies, benchmarking tools, and roadmap templates that highlight efficiency, ROI, and risk reduction.
Persona C: Senior budget holders (CIO, CFOs, CTOs)
- Concerns: balancing cost efficiency with innovation, mitigating compliance and data risks, and ensuring long‑term return on investment from cloud transformation.
- Content preferences: they need executive decks, financial models, and strategic frameworks that demonstrate stability, scalability, and regulatory confidence.
Action point: Create a persona matrix aligned to job functions (e.g. Network Engineer vs. CTO). Map their pain points against the funnel stages they are most likely to participate in. For example, Network Engineers may engage early (seeking practical guides on infrastructure automation), while CTOs will respond to BOFU tools like contract-negotiation checklists and 90-day implementation roadmaps aligned to compliance and risk.
Recommended reading: How to map content to the new buyer journey
3 cloud & infrastructure demand gen plays:
Our AI Buyer Intelligence platform is able to interrogate research patterns by buyer stage. Here's how to action these insights into a full-funnel demand gen strategy aligned to real buyer behaviour:
Tip: Keep the exact keyword phrases in page titles, H2s, alt text, and internal links so performance teams can tie content to intent spikes and prioritise syndication/remarketing accordingly.
Ready to activate these insights?
Why not try our demand gen planning framework? It’s a collection of templates and planning aids, including:
- Buyer group intent mapping
- Multichannel campaign blueprint
- Funnel‑aligned strategy shortcuts
Everything you need to turn category intent insights into campaigns that convert.
