On premises, hosted, and hybrid hosting

Now that we have talked about so many aspects of the underlying components that are used to provide us with a platform on which to deploy an operating system, we can finally talk about where those systems should exist!

This is, at least, the simplest of all our topics. Physical location is easy to explain, even if many businesses get confused about it in practice. Conceptually we really only think about two locations for a workload and that is as being either on premises or off premises. This can be a little convoluted, though, as companies own multiple locations so what is off premises to one site might be see as on premises to another. But we generally consider on premises to be all of a company's owned sites and off premises being any sites that are operated by a third party. Because of this we generally refer to off premises physicality as being hosted, as physical systems are being hosted on our behalf. However, there are reasons...