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This publication has often banged the drum for organisations to ensure their cloud disaster recovery plans are in order. Now cloud service provider Databarracks has put together a series of resources designed to be the “complete DR toolkit.”

We know cloud exits are not the most thrilling topic of conversation. Everyone would much prefer to keep their heads in the sand and talk about how more productive, lean and agile their business will be once they’ve moved the kitchen sink to the cloud. But whether it’s a data breach, or something as extreme as a CSP going under, orchestrating a hasty retreat is of vital significance.

There are three separate documents to the Databarracks disaster recovery toolkit:

• The cost of downtime calculator: This simply calculates revenue divided by number of working hours in the year, as well as totting it up per department and per IT system
• Disaster recovery responsibilities: This is a flow chart designed to tell which job department – IT administrator, IT manager, IT director, CIO and CEO – is responsible for what action in creating a disaster recovery plan
• Disaster recovery runbook: A 20 page document, personalised to suit each company, which aims to detail key internal and external contacts, and a step by step guide to recovering and testing servers. The runbook is modular, so organisations don’t have to follow it to the letter.

“We wanted to be able to provide one kit that contained everything an IT team needs to create and maintain a watertight disaster recovery plan”, said Peter Groucutt, Databarracks managing director.

“It’s difficult for a board to ignore hard figures,” he continued. “Organisations in the UK are risking too much by not having solid [business continuity plans] and DR plans in place. Our DR toolkit shows that good plans don’t have to be complicated or overly expensive, but they do need to be there and they need to be maintained regularly.”

Downtime continues to be the Achilles heel for businesses, especially if their IT architecture is that of an inverted pyramid. At the bottom is the data centre service – at the cheapest end of the scale is a £20 rack that could support £50-£100,000 of hardware and software.

Last month a Databarracks survey found that only 30% of smaller businesses had a business continuity plan in place, compared to 54% of medium organisations and 73% of larger businesses.

The kit can be found here (registration required).