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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?
Buyer behaviour in the cloud and infrastructure category has continued to mature, with Q4 2024 showing a clear shift away from experimentation and towards control, resilience and risk reduction. Compared to the previous quarter, buyers are still investing in innovation, but only where it supports predictable performance, governance and long-term operational stability.
4 key shifts we’re seeing this quarter:
AI readiness has overtaken experimentation as a priority
Interest in AI in cloud services has accelerated, but buyers are framing it as a foundational infrastructure decision rather than a standalone innovation initiative.
Resilience now outweighs edge innovation
Disaster recovery planning has surged, while edge computing continues to decline, signalling a renewed focus on continuity and uptime.
Cost and governance pressures are spreading across buying groups
Financial and operational stakeholders are showing increased engagement in cloud decision-making, not just IT teams.
Vendor risk is under heavier scrutiny
Late-stage research is increasingly centred on SLAs, lock-in risk and long-term support, rather than feature comparisons alone.
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:
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AI in cloud services – Buyers are assessing whether their infrastructure can realistically support AI workloads, data flows and performance demands at scale.
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Hybrid cloud strategies – Buyers are prioritising flexibility and control, researching how to balance on‑prem and cloud environments without increasing complexity or risk.
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Cloud security – Security concerns remain front and centre, with buyers focused on protecting expanding cloud estates against breaches and misconfigurations.
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Cloud cost management – Cost optimisation is a shared priority across IT, finance and operations, as buyers look for predictable spend and stronger financial governance.
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Data backup solutions – Backup and recovery research reflects heightened concern around data protection, recovery speed and business continuity as cloud usage scales.
The topic showing the greatest decline in popularity is:
- Edge computing with a 10% MoM decrease
What do these insights mean for your content strategy?
To keep your strategy aligned to market demand, we recommend:
- Prioritise "how it works" content that operationalises hybrid cloud, security and cost control in real environments, using reference architectures, runbooks and clear before/after diagrams that teams can adapt.
- Make value measurable by anchoring cost and governance content to concrete metrics such as FinOps practices, tagging standards, rightsizing and recovery objectives, with simple tools buyers can use to model impact.
- Treat backup, recovery and continuity as an ongoing resilience programme, documenting restore paths, access controls and testing routines so stakeholders can clearly see how risk is reduced in practice.
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, operational costs and regulatory exposure as cloud environments become more complex.
- Content preferences: they want educational content that explains emerging risks, governance implications and best‑practice frameworks without vendor bias.
Persona B: Mid‑level decision makers (such as Cloud Architects and Operations Managers)
- Concerns: balancing compliance, cost control and vendor reliability while maintaining service performance.
- Content preferences: they want comparison‑driven content, operational models and practical guidance they can apply to real‑world constraints.
Persona C: Senior budget holders (CIO, CFOs, CTOs)
- Concerns: long‑term cost predictability, regulatory risk and exposure from vendor lock‑in or downtime.
- Content preferences: they need clear business cases, risk summaries and financial narratives that support confident investment decisions.
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.
