Contour provides increased intelligence, protection, and flexibility to help simplify the tasks involved in managing information. We also simplify the infrastructure on which information resides while increasing the value of this information.

Businesses create and store different kinds of information about their customers, partners, and employees regarding their sales, assets, liabilities, IT systems, and business processes. Some of this information is critical for maintaining unique business insight and competitive advantage while some is irrelevant and does nothing more than clog IT infrastructure, adding cost and risk to the business.

All of this information, however, along with the hundreds of applications, thousands of new rules and regulations, and the intricate networks of servers require IT departments to spend most of their resources managing the existing infrastructure. This often translates into IT departments only being able to apply 20 percent of their resources to new business opportunities.

In response, Contour has pioneered information lifecycle management (ILM) software along with Contour implementation Services helps organizations store, manage, protect, and share information.

Store
Intelligent storage frees up IT resources for increased innovation and lowered costs through:

• Tiered infrastructure - Maps service levels to information lifecycles.
• Storage management - Discovers and moves information.
• Policy-based movement - Allows metadata to direct the infrastructure.
• ILM enables organizations to establish classes of infrastructure, deploy storage management automation, define information management policies, classify information, and bind to policies. Our focus is on helping companies reduce infrastructure costs, optimize application performance, and appropriately manage both high- and low-value information.

Manage
Resources management provides agility so that IT can capitalize on change instead of avoiding it through:

• Modeling - Creates simple, actionable views of infrastructure, allowing organizations to model the behavior of any device, analyze and pinpoint the root cause of IT problems, and validate changes against business priorities.
  
• Virtualization - Decouples service levels from hardware, enabling non-disruptive information movement and hardware change as well as dynamically allocating resources across applications.
  
• Orchestration - Centralizes control and automation, helping organizations to centrally discover and configure resources while automatically monitoring and reporting on infrastructure operations.
  

Protect
Information protection ensures that information is always an asset - never a liability - through:

• Replication - Creates distributed, redundant architectures so that organizations can leverage more data replication configuration options than with any other vendor in the world while also providing the flexibility to match operational protection requirements.
• Recovery - Restores systems and data based on service levels to permit companies to meet recover point and recover time objectives as well as ensure business-restart for planned and unplanned outages. We focus on helping organizations to recover any site, any application, any volume, and any file as well as to recover to any point and to any time. In addition, we focus on ensuring continuous operation and enhancing performance.
• Security - Protects both infrastructure and information for current and future needs. Security today covers the perimeter and controls access to systems and data. Information, however, moves from system to system, application to application, person to person, and across the extended enterprise. Tomorrow security will be coupled to information, will be application- and role-specific, will be lifecycle-driven, and will cross infrastructure, applications, and organizational boundaries.
  

Share
Information sharing empowers the business to maximize the value of information through:

• Collaborative processes - Designs business process and captures context, allowing organizations to automate business processes and integrate collaborative workspaces to add flexibility and enforce best practices. They can also define rules that drive content automation and provisioning.
• Content services - Consolidates content management platforms so that companies can classify information for search, reuse, and publishing. They can also control editing and versioning with library services as well as manage routing, security, retention, and transformation with lifecycles.
• Repository services - Enforces retention policies, allowing organizations to integrate retention policies and lifecycles, define storage tiers for lifecycle phases, and control dynamic security parameters. We focus on helping companies streamline work processes, capture context for control and policy management, leverage and protect high-value information, and provide common services for all types of content.