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What’s been happening in the cybersecurity 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 cybersecurity 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 cybersecurity 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?
Cybersecurity buyer behaviour shifted meaningfully from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026. Broad awareness research has given way to something more structured, with intent signals pointing to buyers who are now building the operational frameworks to address risk rather than simply mapping the threat landscape.
Four key shifts stand out:
- Zero Trust architecture has moved from boardroom conversation to active evaluation
- Incident response readiness has emerged as a new buying criterion, with response time now tracked by both influencers and mid-level decision makers
- Managed security service providers are displacing standalone tool comparisons in consideration-stage research
- Decision-stage buyers are increasingly focused on total cost of ownership and return on security investment rather than vendor selection alone.
Together, these signals point to a maturing buyer base with more structured evaluation criteria.
Market snapshot
Here's what our latest cybersecurity intent report reveals about the current market:
- Interest is strongest in the finance, healthcare and retail industries.
- Traction is highest among enterprises with 1,000–5,000+ employees.
- IT security, compliance, and risk management functions show the greatest engagement with cybersecurity 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 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. Further segmentation techniques such as topic clusters opens up opportunities to tightly align content to specific audience segments. The result? Relevancy at scale.
Research patterns at account level
5 hot topics dominating research in the cybersecurity space (over the last 3 months), are:- Endpoint protection – The most researched topic this quarter, , reflecting growing concern around frontline attack vectors targeting devices and users at the network edge.
- Zero Trust architecture – Buyers move from awareness of the concept to active evaluation of how to implement it across identity, access, and network segmentation.
- Cloud security – Ongoing demand for visibility and control across hybrid and multi-cloud environments as organisations look to close configuration and compliance gaps.
- Threat intelligence – The fastest-growing topic, signalling a shift from static alerts toward actionable intelligence that improves detection speed and response confidence.
- Vulnerability management – Organisations maintain ongoing programs to identify and prioritise exposure across their infrastructure.
The topic showing the greatest decline in popularity is:
- Security automation with a 10% MoM decrease
What do these insights mean for your content strategy?
To keep your strategy aligned to market demand, we recommend:
- Anchor campaign messaging around breach containment and response speed, not just prevention — buyers across all three groups are tracking incident response time, and content that addresses detection, containment, and recovery will outperform generic threat prevention messaging.
- Build third-party and supply chain risk into your content mix — senior budget holders have shifted from skill shortages to third-party risks as a top concern, so case studies, checklists, and frameworks that address vendor security posture and supply chain exposure are well-timed.
- Position managed security as the answer to the skills gap — skill shortages consistently appear across buyer group pain points. Content that frames managed security partnerships as a practical solution to capability gaps will resonate at both mid-level and senior audience segments.
Pro tip: Use AI/NLP tools (topic modelling, entity extraction, semantic clustering) to audit your content library against competitor coverage. Flag underserved subtopics and build differentiated assets where demand is growing fastest.
Buyer group analysis
For cybersecurity buyers, the stakes are especially high: threats evolve, budgets tighten, and compliance pressures grow. 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 IT analysts or compliance specialists)
- Concerns: data breaches remain the primary concern, but incident response time and skill shortages shape short-term priorities. This group is focused on understanding how attacks happen and how quickly they can be contained, with insider threats indicating they're looking inward as well as outward.
- Content preferences: they want technical explainers, threat breakdowns, and control-level guidance that helps them build the internal case for investment.
Persona B: Mid‑level decision makers (such as IT managers and heads of compliance)
- Concerns: data breaches and incident response time sit alongside skill shortages and third-party risks. This group is balancing threat awareness with resourcing reality and is acutely aware of where its gaps are.
- Content preferences: they want evaluation frameworks, vendor comparisons, and practical examples that reduce decision risk and are easy to present upward.
Persona C: Senior budget holders (CISOs, CIOs, CFOs)
- Concerns: data breaches, third-party risks, and regulatory compliance lead (a notable shift from Q4, where budget constraints and insider threats dominated), indicating growing board-level scrutiny of supply chain exposure and audit readiness.
- Content preferences: they want business‑level narratives, ROI evidence, and clarity on operational ownership and accountability.
Action point: Create a persona matrix aligned to job functions (e.g. IT security analyst vs. CISO). Map their pain points against the funnel stages they are most likely to participate in. For example, security analysts may engage early (awareness content on threat trends), while CISOs will respond to BOFU tools like ROI calculators or negotiation checklists.
Recommended reading: How to map content to the new buyer journey
3 cybersecurity 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.
