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Support Policy

Introduction

This Support Section, the Support Handbook ("Handbook") sets out the technical and support procedures for Contour and the Cloud and Self-Managed Members, including information on upgrades, recommended requirements, security and other technical policies and procedures (as applicable). This Handbook should be read in conjunction with the Membership Agreement entered into between Contour and each Member. This handbook shall be effective throughout the term of the agreement entered into between you (Member) and Contour Pte Ltd (“Contour”) for such Support and may be updated by Contour and notified to the Member per the Membership Agreement by updating this copy located at docs.contour.network

Member Responsibilities

Each Member acknowledges that Contour's ability to provide support is dependent on the performance of these obligations, including the following:

  • Details of employee(s) as authorised representative(s) (the "Member Representative") who will be responsible for engaging the Contour's Support services have been provided to Contour and have registered on the Support Portal. Member's may replace or alter their Member Representative by raising a support ticket or contacting their Contour representative.
  • Issues are raised via the Support Process (defined below)
  • The Member has provided relevant training to individuals who will be using the Platform, including the process for them to raise support issues with Contour (which may be via the Member's central help desk) via the Member's Representative
  • Provide Contour with all reasonable co-operation to facilitate the efficient discharge of its obligations under this Handbook.
  • For Self-Managed members:
    • The Member Representatives are suitably qualified and experienced and have sufficient access to set-up the minimum technical requirements together with required diagnostic information such as system log files, configuration files, crash dumps, infrastructure set-up etc and are authorised to share this with Contour upon request and be comfortable with working through diagnostic procedures as described by the Contour support team.
    • From time to time Contour may request that Member's carry out procedures or changes to the application or configuration to establish a diagnosis or test a potential fix. These procedures and changes may be destructive in nature or have unexpected adverse effects, and while the Contour support team will take every reasonable effort to advise of any impact, it is the Member Representative’s responsibility to apply due-diligence and ensure they are complying with their organisation’s change management and backup policies.

Support Scope

Service Description
Contour Application The collection of interfaces and workflows used to conduct trade finance transactions.
Contour Cloud An instance of the Contour Application hosted and managed by Contour
Contour BNO A Node operated by Contour to facilitate the management of members, static data dissemination and billing functionality
Contour Support Portal Portal for authorised users of Members to raise issues and service requests

Includes

  • Identifying, troubleshooting and resolving problems in the Licensed Software on the Production Network
  • Root cause analysis for Severity 1 and 2 Incidents
  • Assistance with issues during installation
  • Assistance with issues during upgrades
  • Guidance around implementation and configuration

Excludes

  • Support for any software other than the Licensed Software
  • Support for non General Available ("Production" / "Live") versions (e.g Release candidates / Test version are not supported) or non production (e.g. Staging) Networks
  • No on-site support will be provided
  • Versions of the Licensed software that fall outside of the upgrade policy
  • Development questions or requests
  • Product training
  • Support in languages other than English, Mandarin
  • Professional Services
  • System & Performance tuning
  • Design, deployment & Capacity Planning for self-managed members
  • Setting up or installing 3rd party or required Contour dependencies other than issues pertaining to the installation scripts and guides provided by Contour.

Contacting Support

Contour support is only contactable via its Support Portal where Member Representatives can raise requests and report issues electronically. Member acknowledges that any attempts to use other channels (e.g. direct contact with Contour employees or over public internet forums and chat channels) may trigger delays in response times and resolution of the error.

The portal will be restricted to Members only. Kindly contact your sales representative if you, or others in your organisation require a user account to access the support portal. Queries from non-Members should be directed to Contour's sales teams.

  • Members that have selected to receive the Corda Enterprise license from Contour, must contact Contour and not R3 for Corda Enterprise support.
  • Members that have selected to be sponsored onto the Corda Network by Contour, must contact Contour and not Corda Network or R3 for support.

In both the cases above, Contour will liaise between the Member and the respective partyggg

Only in the event that the Support Portal is unavailable, Contour will active and allow emails to the support@contour.network email address.

What to do before contacting Contour for Support?

In order to best provide Support, Contour requires Members to (i) define the problem (as specifically as possible); and (ii) gather relevant technical information. This enables the Contour Support team to provide support in the most expedient manner.

Defining the problem entails answering as many of the following questions in as much detail as necessary:

  • Is this already a known issue in the release notes?
  • What were you expecting to happened, and what happened instead?
  • How does the problem affect your application or service as a whole?
  • Is this problem repeatable?
  • When did this problem first arise? If this is a recurring problem, how frequently does this problem recur?
  • Have there been any recent changes have been made to the application and/or its environment?
  • To analyse and diagnose the problem effectively, the Contour Support team needs to have as much technical information about the problem as possible. File logs, screenshots, error messages should be zipped together and attached to the ticket which is raised.

For self-manged users who have a technical issue, please complete the self-managed support checklist for your Contour version.

Issue Classifications

Broadly, there are three types of support requests: * Production issues ("Issues") causing impact to current business operations * General questions on functionality or technology * Technical support in setting-up a self-managed node, API usages, 3rd party integrations

Issues will be classified by Contour, in discussion with the Member and in accordance with the following levels of severity. All other types of support requests will be classified as a Severity 4.

  • Severity 1 / Critical Impact. An emergency situation which critically impairs the Member's business operations until it is rectified or a workaround is in place. Such incidents are typically characterised by the loss of entire application systems or security breaches and will cause material financial, reputational, compliance, or significant increase in risk of impact) if not resolved quickly.
  • Severity 2 / Significant Impact. A detrimental situation caused by an significant error in the application, performance degrades substantially under reasonable loads or key functionalities of the application are not accessible by all users, thereby causing a significant impact on business operations.
  • Severity 3 / Moderate impact. The application is impaired caused by unexpected behaviour in the application. The impact is not time critical, has a reasonable workaround or only impacts selected users, thereby causing little or no significant impact.
  • Severity 4 / Low Impact. A noticeable situation, caused by an error in the application, in which use of the application is affected in some cosmetic or ergonomic way and has minimal impact causing no significant impact on business operations, or an issue which is reasonably correctable by a documentation change or by a future, regular release from Contour.

Major Incidents

An event defined as an issue that impacts (or has the potential to impact) a large number of Members.

Security Incidents

The detection of a event that has compromised the security of the network, or the attempt of such an event, is considered a Major Incident and will be managed as such.

Incident Response

The Support Portal is operational 24*7. The following response times are applicable for issues raised

Severity Mean Time to Response Mean Time to Resolution
1 / Critical <4h <8h
2 / High <8h <24h
3 / Medium 1 Business Days 3 Business Days
4 /Low 2 Business Days 5 Business Days
  • "Business Day" as defined in the Membership Agreement
  • "Mean Time to Response" is calculated as the duration between the incident being raised in the support portal and the incident being acknowledged by support divided by the number of incidents in a month.
  • "Mean Time to Resolution" is calculated as the duration between the incident being raised and the incident fix being proposed to the Member (minus the time awaiting any customer responses) divided by the number of incidents in a month.

Excused Failures

Failure to meet any SLAs will be excused to the extent the following circumstances are present:

  • Any incident received and subsequently cancelled or if the member is not contactable
  • For request for service, enhancement, clarification, queries and feedbacks
  • Actions or inactions of Member, or third-party vendor thereto (other than Contour and its subcontractors)
  • The failure of, or problems relating to, network services, connections, software, firmware or equipment not under the control of Contour
  • Misuse of the Contour Software, or use or installation of the Contour Software other than as permitted in Membership agreement
  • Any action of any Governmental Authority which prevents Contour from providing Support
  • Any Force Majeure Event (as defined in the Membership Agreement), as long as Contour complies with reasonable disaster recovery procedures.
  • During a Platform Suspension Event
  • Where the Member has not met the required dependencies as outlined in this handbook or those specified for self-managed members per the installation instructions.

Contour Cloud

In order to operate in an efficient and secure manner, the Contour Cloud Service requires routine maintenance and upgrades.

Routine Maintenance

Routine Maintenance may performed during the hours of Saturday 09:00 through Saturday 23:00 SGT. Routine Maintenance encompasses service changes initiated by Contour or the Member. Contour initiated maintenance duration resulting in unavailability of a Member's service will be < 4h per month

The following events will be managed as Routine Maintenance:

  • An upgrade to the latest version of Contour
  • Where Contour has identified any infrastructure changes are required to deliver optimum performance of the service
  • Due to the identification of vulnerabilities in a service, it’s dependencies, or the underlying infrastructure platform. These could come from:
    • Vendor or CERT email bulletins
    • Identification of dependency vulnerabilities during CI activities
    • Identification of dependency vulnerabilities during workload or virtual machine image creation.
    • Identification of infrastructure vulnerabilities during routine internal or external vulnerability assessments against running infrastructure
    • Incident response activities

Self-Managed Members

Each new version of Contour will specify the minimum version for required dependencies (including Corda Enterprise, Database, Operating System etc).

Whitelisting

Contour is a fully decentralised network made up of multiple parties hosting nodes in various locations and infrastructure types (Cloud, on-prem). Contour also leverages the Corda Network that is also fully decentralised. New parties join the network constantly and parties are free to change their hosting arrangements at any point. Each party, including members, Contour and the Corda Network, have no obligation to keep their node URLs or IP addresses static. Contour (and the underlying Corda Enterprise blockchain technology) have been specifically designed to accommodate changing URLs and IP addresses.

Due to this design, Contour does not support any network traffic whitelisting, as any misconfiguration or stale whitelists may result in transaction delays and communication failures between members. Should such an issue occur, Contour will work with the impacted members to determine if the root cause is due to blocked traffic by one member and will facilitate resolution of the issue. Please note that Contour does not take responsibility for such issues and these issues fall outside of our service level agreements (SLAs). Contour will, on a best endeavors basis, notify members as soon as practicably possible, when it has been made aware of URL or IP changes to a node it or the Corda Network hosts.

If a member must implement whitelisting, it must acknowledge the above and should then only implement top level domain whitelisting (eg .contournetwork.io, .corda.network for network services) and update this daily based on Contour's latest membership.

Emergency Maintenance

Emergency Maintenance is only performed when there is critical upgrade to be applied to maintain integrity and security of the network. The date and timing of the maintenance will attempt to be executed during non business hours for the impacted Members.

The following triggers will be managed as Emergency Maintenance:

  • Where there is information that a vulnerability is being actively exploited “in the wild” (for example, when exploits are available in exploitDB or notification from vendor or vulnerability management software), mitigating action (patching or compensating control) will be taken immediately.
  • Where there is an immediate threat to the confidentiality or security of the Member's data or overall network stability. In extremis, a Platform Suspension Event may be required.

Communication

In the event of a Major Incident or Emergency Maintenance, Contour will, as soon as practicably possible, inform all Members (via their provided technical contacts and posted on the Support Portal) of the details and planned remediation steps. Regular updates will be continued until the issue is fully resolved.

Dependencies

Chosen Cloud Provider

At the time of subscription, if Contour Cloud is selected then each Member is required to chose from the selection of supported providers and regions to host their Contour Cloud node. Contour only enables regions that offer the services required for our high availability, active / active setup and multiple availability zones in order to minimize potential downtime caused by service, component or data centre issues.

Corda Network

Contour can sponsor a member's access to the Corda Network and fully manage this dependency.

Corda Network is a publicly-available internet of Corda nodes operated by network participants. Corda Network enables interoperability – the exchange of data or assets via a secure, efficient internet layer – in a way that isn’t possible with separate, isolated Corda networks. A common trust root surrounds all transactions, and a consistent set of network parameters ensures all participants may transact with each other.

  • Identity service: the Identity Manager admits new participants onto Corda Network.
  • Network Map service: the Network Map accepts digitally signed documents describing network routing and identifying information from nodes, based on the participation certificates signed by the Identity Manager, and makes this information available to all Corda Network nodes.
  • Notary service: Corda design separates correctness consensus from uniqueness consensus, and the latter is provided by one or more Notaries. The Notary will digitally sign a transaction presented to it, provided no transaction referring to any of the same inputs has been previously signed by the Notary, and the transaction timestamp is within bounds.

User Browsers

Contour supports the current and first previous major releases of the following browsers:

  • Google Chrome
  • Microsoft Edge (Chromium)