15 August 2026
A meeting recording ends up in one of two places: written to the local disk of whoever pressed record, or uploaded to the video platform's cloud storage. Which one your platform does by default determines who can get to the file later, who can delete it, and what a compliance team can actually promise about it. Most people never ask which model they're on until someone needs a recording deleted, or produced, on a deadline.
Local recording writes the file to the machine running the meeting app — usually the host's laptop, sometimes each participant's own device if the platform records client-side. Nothing leaves that computer unless a person moves it. Cloud recording sends the stream to the vendor's servers during or after the call, and the file lives in an account tied to the organization's subscription, not to any one person's hardware.
The distinction sounds like a storage detail but it's really a question of custody. With local recording, the person whose machine made the file is the only one who has it until they choose to share it. With cloud recording, the organization's admin console has it, and IT can reach it without asking that person first.
Cloud recording isn't free once volume grows. Most platforms bundle a fixed storage allowance into a plan and bill per gigabyte-month past that, which means an org that records every meeting accumulates a growing monthly line item — and someone eventually has to decide which recordings are worth paying to keep. Local recording has no equivalent bill from the meeting vendor; the cost shows up instead as disk space on individual machines and, if IT wants a backup, whatever the company's own file storage already costs.
The trade is that cloud storage is centrally visible — finance and IT can see exactly how much is being kept and where — while local storage is invisible until someone goes looking for a specific file and can't find it.
Cloud platforms let an admin set an org-wide retention window — delete recordings after 90 days, for instance — and it applies uniformly. That's the version a compliance team wants to hear about, because it means the organization has one retention clock instead of hundreds.
Local recording has no such clock unless someone builds one. Retention is whatever the individual laptop's owner decides, which in practice means some recordings get deleted in a week and others sit on a hard drive for years, unindexed and forgotten. Neither extreme is a policy — both are just what happened.
This is the question that matters most when someone asks for a recording to be removed — a departing employee, a legal hold that's expired, a customer exercising a data deletion right. On cloud storage, an admin deletes it from the console and it's gone from the vendor's servers, full stop. On local storage, the organization can ask the person who has the file to delete it, but there's no remote switch; if that person has already copied it elsewhere, or left the company with the laptop, the recording persists outside anyone's control.
This cuts both ways. Cloud deletion is enforceable but also means the vendor had the file to begin with, which is itself a fact some compliance teams weigh against convenience.
Before signing off on a meeting platform, most compliance reviewers want answers to the same handful of questions, and the local-versus-cloud choice changes every one of them.
Data residency asks where the file physically sits — which country, which data center — and local recording's answer is simply wherever the employee is sitting, which is either reassuring or useless depending on the regulation. Encryption at rest asks who can decrypt the file without the account owner's involvement — for cloud storage that's the vendor's key management, for local storage it's whatever disk encryption the device already has. Retention schedule asks whether deletion is enforced or discretionary, and legal hold asks whether the organization can freeze deletion of a specific recording on demand — something a central console does automatically and a scattered fleet of laptops cannot.
AVAY saves the recording to the machine that made it, not to AVAY's own cloud storage. That keeps the raw audio and video out of a central repository — there's no vendor-held file for compliance to worry about, and no per-gigabyte storage bill accumulating on the account. The transcript, the running notes, and the decisions log are a separate artifact: those are indexed centrally so the AI participant can search across every past meeting when someone asks it a question later.
The practical consequence is about sharing. If a recording lives only on one person's laptop, nobody else gets it automatically — someone has to actually upload it somewhere and send the link. A colleague who joins the meeting late, or wasn't in it at all, will find the transcript and notes searchable right away, but the video file itself is exactly as available as the person who has it chooses to make it.
| Local recording | Cloud recording | |
|---|---|---|
| Storage cost | No per-GB vendor bill; cost is disk space on the device | Bundled allowance, then billed per gigabyte-month |
| Retention control | Whatever the device owner decides, no org-wide clock | Admin sets one retention window for everyone |
| Who can delete it | Only the person holding the file, no remote reach | Admin can delete it from the console at any time |
| Compliance answer on residency | Wherever the employee happens to be sitting | A named data center under a stated jurisdiction |
| Sharing after the call | Whoever has it must upload and send it manually | Anyone with account access can pull it from storage |
The recording file is on the device that made it, so you'd get a copy from whoever recorded, the same way you'd ask a colleague for a file on their laptop. The transcript, notes, and decisions from that meeting are searchable in AVAY regardless, since those are indexed separately from the video file.
Not automatically. A legal hold on cloud storage is enforced by freezing deletion in the vendor's console; a legal hold on a local file depends on someone telling the device's owner not to delete it, which is a process question for the organization, not something the meeting platform can guarantee.
Whatever is on that laptop goes with the standard offboarding process — if IT images the device or backs it up before wiping it, the recording survives; if not, it's gone. This is the main argument organizations make for cloud recording when a file needs to outlast any one employee.
Yes — nothing stops you from uploading the file to a shared drive, a cloud storage bucket, or sending it directly to whoever needs it. Local storage means the platform didn't do that for you automatically, not that you can't do it yourself.
It avoids the vendor holding a copy of every meeting's raw audio and video, which some compliance teams prefer, and it avoids the storage bill that accumulates when every call gets recorded to the cloud by default. The cost is that retention and deletion become the organization's own responsibility instead of a setting in an admin console.
Local recording keeps the raw file off the vendor's servers and off the storage bill, but retention and deletion become the organization's job; cloud recording centralizes both, at a cost per gigabyte and a vendor holding the file.
Meetings that take their own notes, in the browser: avay.ai.