The appliance can be installed - as a personal instance - on the company's own hardware (on-premise). Today, however, the preferred way is to provide it in the cloud.
All that is required is an account with a hyperscaler such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform and various licences.
For example, a licence for a solution instance of the SAP Cloud Appliance Library for a fully activated appliance can be purchased for three months. In addition, further SAP usage rights (such as named user licences) and an IaaS cloud contract are required.
Alternatively, companies can use the appliance with a 30-day trial licence.
The setup of the test and demo system can be implemented within a few hours, so that companies can experience SAP S/4HANA much faster than would be possible via the setup of a project development system.
User access to the appliance is usually via SAP Fiori. However, access is also possible via SAP GUI, SAP HANA Studio, Windows Remote Desktop or the backend operating system.
SAP does not recommend using it as a development system in implementation projects. The reason is that some of the components and configuration settings (some with a separate licence) may conflict with later use in a production system.