In this chapter, we look at what we can do with an on-premises agent, what an agent is capable of doing, and how to deploy an agent. But before we do that, we need to understand the following three topics:

All our examples so far have illustrated cloud-to-cloud integration or integrations within a single cloud. Whilst this is the likely future of a great deal of IT operations, this is not where things are today when a mix of cloud and on-premises integration exists, and maybe will have to exist this way for a very long time to come; possibly forever. This means that, for ICS to be effective, we need to support accessing on-premises systems and potentially even executing some processing remotely in the on-premises environment.

Once we have understood when an agent is best suited to help us for reasons beyond the simple practicalities, for example,...