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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...
This quarter vs last quarter: what’s changed?
Cloud and infrastructure buyer behaviour shifted meaningfully from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026. Architecture-led research has given way to something more operationally grounded, with intent signals pointing to buyers who are now focused on cost control, reliability, and resilience rather than broad platform evaluation.
Four key shifts stand out:
- Cost efficiency has moved to the top of the evaluation agenda, with buyers increasingly researching cloud cost management strategies and total cost of ownership
- Operational reliability has become a cross-stakeholder concern, with service downtime and high operational costs now appearing across all three buyer groups
- Integration complexity has emerged as a key adoption challenge, as organisations expanding hybrid and multi-cloud environments scrutinise how new platforms connect with existing systems
- Vendor evaluation is becoming more financially structured, shifting from risk topics like vendor lock-in toward TCO modelling, vendor comparison criteria, and implementation roadmaps.
Together, these signals point to buyers who have moved past initial cloud adoption and are now focused on making their cloud investments perform and prove their value.
Market snapshot
Here's what our latest cloud and infrastructure intent report reveals about the current market:
- Interest is strongest in the IT, 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:
- Data backup and recovery – The most researched topic this quarter, reflecting a market-wide focus on infrastructure resilience and business continuity as organisations look to protect against data loss and minimise recovery time.
- Cloud security – Driven by growing scrutiny of security posture across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, with buyers focused on visibility, configuration control, and compliance assurance.
- Multi-cloud strategies – Buyers are actively evaluating how to distribute workloads across multiple cloud providers to reduce vendor dependency and improve infrastructure flexibility as their cloud estates mature.
- Hybrid cloud solutions – A foundational research area as organizations work through the operational complexity of managing workloads across private and public cloud environments, particularly as integration challenges rise up the pain point list.
- Kubernetes management – Reflecting growing demand for container orchestration expertise as organizations scale cloud-native application deployments and look to standardize workload management across complex environments.
The topic showing the greatest decline in popularity is:
- Disaster recovery planning with a 10% MoM decrease
What do these insights mean for your content strategy?
To keep your strategy aligned to market demand, we recommend:
- Lead with cost visibility and financial outcomes rather than platform capabilities — cloud cost management is up 10% MoM and high operational costs dominate buyer group pain points across all three personas, so content that demonstrates spend control, TCO clarity, and measurable efficiency will outperform architecture-led messaging.
- Build resilience and recovery into your content mix now — data backup and recovery is the most researched topic this quarter, and with disaster recovery planning also in decline as a search term, buyers are moving from planning to execution; practical content around backup strategy, recovery time objectives, and business continuity will land well.
- Don't ignore edge computing — with 50% MoM growth it's the fastest-rising topic in the category, and while it may not yet dominate pain points, it represents a leading indicator of where buyer attention is heading; early-mover content around edge use cases and distributed infrastructure will build authority ahead of the curve.
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: data security breaches and service downtime lead, alongside high operational costs and lack of expertise. This group is closest to the technical reality of cloud performance, and their priorities reflect the day-to-day friction of keeping systems secure, stable, and running within budget.
- Content preferences: they want technical deep-dives, security and reliability frameworks, and architecture guidance that helps them diagnose gaps and build a credible case for change.
Persona B: Mid‑level decision makers (such as Cloud Architects and Operations Managers)
- Concerns: integration challenges and scalability issues dominate, with high operational costs and lack of expertise close behind. This group is focused on what it actually takes to make cloud work in practice, navigating the gap between strategic intent and operational delivery.
- Content preferences: they want vendor comparison frameworks, integration guidance, and practical implementation examples that reduce deployment risk and make it straightforward to present options upward.
Persona C: Senior budget holders (CIO, CFOs, CTOs)
- Concerns: high operational costs lead, followed by regulatory compliance and data security breaches. This group is focused on financial performance and risk exposure, and the prominence of compliance and security at board level signals that governance and liability are becoming as important as cost control.
- Content preferences: they need business-level narratives, ROI evidence, and compliance assurance. TCO analyses, risk reduction frameworks, and content that ties infrastructure decisions to measurable business outcomes are especially well-matched to this group.
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 and 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.
