The most effective transition to a cloud computing approach enables organizations to yield the following benefits:

• Efficiency Through Utilization and Automation - In addition to the known cost savings, cloud computing and the Contour approach deliver lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by minimizing unnecessary IT infrastructure investments, providing efficient management and maintenance tools, and preventing technology lock-in. They help IT to adopt a more cost-effective, self-managed, dynamically optimized environment for the most efficient delivery of IT services. They provide additional flexibility by developing and deploying applications that can run in the datacenter or at a cloud service provider. With this cloud computing approach, organizations move toward an infrastructure that uses policy-driven management and automation to monitor itself, self-optimizing for load and demand on the applications, based on usage.
• Agility with Control - The Contour cloud computing approach also dramatically simplifies IT services provisioning and deployment, so IT organizations can respond more quickly to business needs. At the same time, it allows IT staff to implement policies consistent with business and governance requirements, providing the control IT needs to minimize business and regulatory risk. An effective cloud strategy also means ensuring security and eliminating the need to constantly reconfigure static security infrastructure for this dynamic computing environment. Cloud computing allows IT organizations to maintain full control over the availability, reliability, scalability, security and service level agreements (SLAs) for all workloads.
• Freedom of Choice  - With the Contour cloud computing approach, organizations gain the flexibility to retain existing operating system and application stacks, yet deploy them internally or externally with any VMware vCloud™ service provider. IT staff can continue to support traditional systems, while removing many of the headaches associated with them—system porting, security patches and more. They can also gain more predictable performance. Cloud computing delivers more freedom to users without sacrificing IT staff control. End users can consume IT services from traditional applications, onsite cloud applications and external service provider offerings, and have rapid access to their data anytime, anywhere. Meanwhile, VMware end-user computing solutions provide freedom to manage access to applications and services by policies across platforms and devices.

CONTOUR'S APPROACH

Virtualization is the essential catalyst for enabling the transition to cloud computing. VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, builds on virtualization to deliver cloud infrastructure and management solutions, cloud application platform solutions and end-user computing solutions that significantly reduce IT complexity.

Contour enables organizations to energize their business, while saving energy— financial, human and the Earth's. Its customer-proven solutions provide organizations with all of the capabilities necessary to achieve the benefits of cloud computing.

Security

Virtualization is indispensable for transitioning legacy applications to new cloud infrastructures and a critical security enabler in a cloud environment. VMware provides the foundation for the next generation of cloud security to address the challenges of securing applications and data in the cloud. VMware solutions offer unique introspection capabilities that help to identify hard-to-detect problems and enable comprehensive security controls. These capabilities result in better performance, reduced complexity and more comprehensive security protection.

With Contour solutions, organizations can be assured security policies can be rapidly implemented and monitored for IT compliance while maintaining the relevant levels of control and visibility into ownership domains. They can make security agile, so IT staff can leverage dynamic capabilities, such as live migration, and ensure that the security policies follow the IT service seamlessly. They can also deliver a single, cost-effective framework for the comprehensive protection of cloud deployments.

Automation and Management

Instead of spending valuable time managing physical infrastructure or applications, Contour solutions enable organizations to focus on innovation and delivering value to the business. Once all hardware resources are pooled into virtual building blocks and service-levels are defined with associated applications, organizations can deploy an automation plan based upon business rules and application needs. Cloud automation and cloud management drive the ultimate efficiency in IT, mapping plans and policies to the business and defining them within the service delivery mechanism (applications and services delivered according to service-levels) of the cloud.

Automation and management rules applied to the cloud infrastructure effectively lead to a zero-touch infrastructure, where IT is available as a service. IT organizations also can better manage risk with an approach to cloud computing that retains the security, control and compliance that the business demands.

Interoperability and Openness

In addition to serving as a secure foundation for cloud computing, Contour solutions ensure application portability between internal datacenters and external hosting and service provider clouds from VMware vCloud partners. This enables applications to run with little or no modification internally or externally. Beyond infrastructure, VMware offers a cloud application platform that allows developers to create portable cloud applications that further enhance an organization's ability to respond to change. Today, more than 2 million developers worldwide rely on VMware cloud application platform solutions to create rich applications that are portable, dynamic, scalable and optimized for cloud-scale deployment, including deployment on popular public cloud offerings such as VMforce and Google App Engine. IT staff can extend this agility to end users by leveraging VMware solutions to dynamically provision and manage cloud-ready IT services securely across any device.

Contour solutions ensure application mobility and portability between clouds within a common management and security model. They are based on open standards, including the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), which has been adopted as an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard. They also extend to a large ecosystem of service providers.

Self-Service for the Cloud

At the application or service layer, cloud computing offers a new service consumption approach that applies standardization and automation to enable rapid service provisioning. By standardizing processes, increasing automation and delivering IT as a Service, VMware solutions help drive additional savings beyond virtualization, while significantly reducing the amount of maintenance required per IT administrator.

Instead of waiting for manual IT procurement and provisioning processes, lines of business are able to consume services exactly when they need them. With new VMware products, IT organizations can now deliver standardized IT services on shared infrastructure through a Web-based catalog. By standardizing these service offerings, organizations can simplify many IT management tasks—from troubleshooting and patching to change management—and eliminate much of the administrative maintenance that burdens an IT team today. They can also automate provisioning through policy-based workflows that empower validated users to deploy preconfigured services with the click of a button. Meanwhile, IT retains control over policies and billing that govern service usage.

Pooling & Dynamic Resource Allocation

The private cloud changes an IT organization's approach to resource management from discrete hardware to virtualized pools of shared resources, including servers, storage and networking. By virtualizing all IT resources, IT staff sees increased resource utilization rates and dynamic distribution of resources toward high-priority applications.

These shared resource pools are abstracted into logical building blocks that consist of storage, network and server units, effectively creating virtual data centers. Based on business demands, these resource containers can be constructed to provide specific service-levels or meet particular business needs, or they can be divided by logical business units or functions (for instance, sales, finance or R&D). By standardizing on a set of well-defined offerings, organizations can evolve toward a policy-driven approach to computing.