In short

Around 2022-2023 several video wall vendors bet on a cloud-managed future — the wall configuration, the source routing, sometimes the video itself, all running through a SaaS control plane. By 2026 the verdict, in our assessment, is clear: cloud-only management rarely gets through the compliance review in regulated industries. What holds up there is the hybrid pattern. This article lays out what goes in the cloud, what stays on-prem, and why the split is not a compromise but the correct design.

Why cloud-only video wall management failed

The cloud-only pitch was attractive on paper: manage every wall across every site from one browser, push updates centrally, no on-prem server to maintain. The problem is that a video wall in a control room, NOC, or SOC carries content that regulators do not allow to leave the building.

A NOC wall shows live network topology and customer-impacting fault data. A SOC wall shows live security-camera feeds and SIEM alerts. A utility control room shows SCADA telemetry from critical infrastructure. Routing any of that through a third-party cloud — even just as a control signal that implies the underlying data — triggers a compliance review that cloud-only architectures rarely pass.

The four compliance walls

GDPR (EU). Live camera feeds containing identifiable individuals are personal data under Article 4(1). Processing that data via a control plane hosted outside the EU — or by a US-headquartered cloud provider subject to the US CLOUD Act — requires a documented transfer mechanism and risk assessment (the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, in force since July 2023, or standard contractual clauses), which many facilities prefer not to take on.
FZ-152 and FZ-187 (Russia). FZ-152 (Article 18(5)) requires Russian citizens' personal data to be recorded and stored in databases located in Russia. FZ-187 adds critical-information-infrastructure rules for sectors such as energy, transport and finance, which are commonly interpreted as keeping the operational layer in-country and often air-gapped.
FedRAMP and DoD impact levels (US federal). A video wall in a federal facility handling controlled unclassified information cannot route through a commercial SaaS control plane unless the provider holds a FedRAMP authorisation at the matching impact level; classified information falls outside FedRAMP and stays on separate classified networks.
BSI C5 (Germany). The German federal cloud-security criteria catalogue sets a bar that most general-purpose SaaS control planes do not meet, pushing German public-sector deployments toward on-prem or sovereign-cloud designs.

Any one of these can be enough to disqualify a cloud-only video wall from a regulated deployment. In practice most large control-room buyers face at least one.

The hybrid pattern — what goes where

The hybrid architecture splits the system along a clean line: the control plane can live in the cloud; the data plane stays on-prem. Mersive's Solstice Cloud is one example from the meeting-room world: the cloud portal manages the deployment, while screen content never leaves the on-site pod.

What can live in the cloud

The management UI itself — the browser application an administrator uses to configure walls, hosted as a SaaS app
Configuration metadata — layout definitions, named scenes, user accounts and permissions, source catalogues (the address of a source, not its content)
Fleet telemetry — which walls are online, software versions, health status across sites
Audit logs — the record of who changed what, when (the metadata of changes, not the content shown)

What must stay on-prem

The video itself — every pixel of every source feed. Camera streams, dashboard renders, KVM sessions never leave the local network
The compositor — the engine that lays sources onto the wall runs on the on-prem server, next to the displays it drives
Source ingestion — NDI, RTSP, IPMX, KVM endpoints connect to the on-prem server, not to a cloud endpoint
The fallback path — if the cloud control plane is unreachable, the on-prem server must keep the wall running with its last known configuration. The wall cannot depend on cloud connectivity to display.

The control plane in the cloud

The value the cloud control plane genuinely delivers, once the data plane is correctly kept local:

Multi-site management — one interface for a NOC operator managing walls across a dozen facilities
Centralised configuration rollout — push a new named scene to every site at once
Fleet visibility — health and version status across the estate without touching each server

The constraint that makes this safe: the control plane handles addresses and definitions, never content. A cloud control plane that says "put the source at 10.20.30.40 into tile 3" is compliant. A cloud control plane that relays the video from 10.20.30.40 is not. The architecture has to enforce that line, not just document it.

The video plane on-prem

The on-prem server does the work that cannot leave the building: ingests every source, runs the compositor, drives the displays, and holds a complete local copy of the configuration so it survives a cloud outage. For a regulated deployment, the on-prem server is also the air-gap boundary — it can run with no outbound internet at all, with the cloud control plane simply unavailable and the wall managed locally.

This is the test for any vendor claiming "hybrid": unplug the internet, and the wall must keep running and stay locally manageable. If the wall degrades or the management UI becomes unreachable, the architecture is cloud-dependent, not hybrid.

KVM in the hybrid model

IP-KVM is the case where the on-prem boundary matters most. A KVM session is an operator taking live control of a source computer — the most sensitive traffic on the wall. In a hybrid architecture, the KVM session is strictly on-prem: the cloud control plane may know that a KVM route exists and who is authorised to use it, but the keyboard, video, and mouse traffic flows entirely on the local network. Any vendor whose KVM path touches the cloud has not built a compliant hybrid system.

Where Craft Wall fits

Craft Wall is on-premises only by design. The compositor, source ingestion, and the complete configuration run on a commodity Linux server inside the facility. The browser-based control UI is served from that same on-prem server, so every deployment can run air-gapped, with no cloud dependency at all.

Craft Wall has no cloud control plane: management and configuration stay on the on-prem server, so nothing — metadata included — has to leave the site, and the unplug-the-internet test above is passed by design. See the NOC reference architecture for the on-prem design and the eight-platform comparison for how vendors differ on the cloud-dependency question — it is one of the sharper dividing lines in the category.

Closing

The cloud-only video wall was a reasonable bet that the compliance environment has largely ruled out for regulated rooms. Hybrid is not a half-measure — it is the correct architecture: the cloud does what the cloud is good at (multi-site management, centralised rollout) and the on-prem layer does what regulation requires (every pixel stays in the building). The buyer's test is simple and physical: unplug the internet, and the wall keeps working. If it does, the architecture is hybrid. If it does not, it is cloud-dependent wearing a hybrid label.

Read next: the NOC reference architecture for the on-prem design, AI-augmented video walls for why on-prem inference follows the same compliance logic, and the Craft Wall vs Userful comparison for the cloud-dependency contrast in a real evaluation.

Frequently asked questions

What is the metadata-in-cloud, pixels-on-prem video wall pattern?

An architectural split where video and configuration stay on-prem (compliance-compatible), while metadata about wall state, operator activity, layouts, and source inventory flows to a cloud control plane. Administrators can manage layouts centrally in the cloud and push them to the on-prem wall, but operators must still be able to sign in and control the wall locally when the internet link is down. The actual video pixels never leave the customer network. In our assessment, this pattern gets through GDPR, FZ-152, FedRAMP or BSI C5 review far more often than a pure cloud video wall.

Why did cloud-only video wall fail compliance reviews?

Most regulated industries (energy, banking, healthcare, public sector) classify operational video feeds as 'high-sensitivity' or 'critical-infrastructure data'. Sending these to a cloud provider — even one with appropriate certifications — triggers compliance frameworks (GDPR rules on transfers to third countries, FZ-152 Russian personal-data localisation, the BSI C5 cloud-security criteria, FedRAMP authorisation at the Moderate or High baseline). In our assessment, that is why cloud-only management has gained little ground in regulated control rooms, where buyers expect on-prem or hybrid designs.

How does hybrid cloud video wall handle GDPR?

Video data is personal data when it captures identifiable individuals. The hybrid pattern keeps that data within the operator's GDPR-controlled environment — only minimal operational metadata flows to the cloud, and that metadata can include operator identifiers, which are personal data too. The cloud control plane processes only system-state data (layouts, operator IDs, source URLs) — no video frames, no face recognition output, no biometric inference. EU operators typically sign a data processing agreement (Article 28) covering the metadata channel, operator identifiers included; the video itself stays out of the provider's scope.

What goes in the cloud vs on-prem?

Cloud: central copies of user accounts and roles, wall-layout definitions, source inventory metadata, copies of operator activity audit logs (which contain operator identifiers), software update distribution, multi-site coordination state. On-prem: all video frames, all capture (HDMI, NDI, RTSP feeds), the local control plane that executes operator commands and keeps authenticating operators with the internet unplugged, a complete local copy of the configuration, all biometric / AI inference output, all customer-domain configuration files (network ACLs, integration credentials).

Is hybrid cloud video wall the standard architecture in 2026?

In our assessment, for regulated industries hybrid or fully on-prem designs are what passes review, and cloud-only rarely does. In non-regulated AV (corporate boardrooms, education, retail), cloud-managed deployment is common because compliance review is not a binding constraint. Fully on-prem remains the only option for air-gapped deployments (defence, nuclear). The architecture choice tends to follow the regulatory environment rather than technical preference.