Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Disaster Recovery Officer

🎯 Role Definition

The Disaster Recovery Officer is a subject-matter expert who develops and maintains the Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) and Business Continuity Plan (BCP), leads disaster recovery exercises and live recoveries, defines recovery time and point objectives (RTO/RPO), conducts business impact analyses (BIA), coordinates cross-functional incident response, manages recovery vendors and service providers, and reports recovery readiness and compliance metrics to senior leadership. The DRO acts as the primary coordinator during outages impacting IT infrastructure or critical business functions, ensuring a rapid, controlled, and auditable restoration of services with minimal business impact.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Business Continuity Analyst / Junior Disaster Recovery Analyst
IT Operations Analyst / Systems Administrator
Risk & Resilience Analyst

Advancement To:

Senior Disaster Recovery Officer / Lead Business Continuity Manager
Head of Resilience / Director, Business Continuity & IT Resilience
Chief Risk Officer / VP, IT Operations (depending on organization size)

Lateral Moves:

IT Security Manager / Incident Response Manager
Vendor Risk Manager / Compliance Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Develop, maintain, and version-control the enterprise Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) and Business Continuity Plan (BCP), ensuring alignment with corporate risk appetite, legal/regulatory requirements, and audit standards.
Lead and manage regular disaster recovery and business continuity exercises — tabletop, simulated, and full failover tests — across cloud, virtualized, and physical environments; capture lessons learned and drive remediation until closure.
Conduct and update Business Impact Analyses (BIA) and Threat, Vulnerability, and Risk Assessments (TVRA) to identify critical business processes, define dependencies, and prioritize recovery sequencing with measurable RTOs and RPOs.
Define, document, and maintain clear recovery procedures, runbooks, and playbooks for critical systems (ERP, CRM, email, databases, file shares, network services) to enable reproducible, auditable recovery actions during incidents.
Own backup and restore strategy design and verification: ensure backup policies, retention, encryption, and periodic restore-based validation meet recovery objectives and compliance requirements.
Coordinate multi-stakeholder incident response and recovery activities during real incidents acting as recovery lead or liaison to the Incident Command Structure; escalate to senior management and provide timely status updates.
Manage cloud disaster recovery strategies and implementations (e.g., replication, cross-region failover, infrastructure-as-code recovery), ensuring feasible recovery paths for AWS, Azure, GCP-hosted services and hybrid architectures.
Define and monitor DR readiness metrics and KPIs (test pass rate, mean time to recover, recovery point compliance), prepare executive-level dashboards and post-incident reports for the risk committee and auditors.
Implement and manage disaster recovery tooling (orchestration, monitoring, backup solutions, replication technologies), including vendor selection, SLA negotiation, contract management, and operational handoff.
Maintain an up-to-date inventory and dependency map of critical applications, data flows, third-party providers, and infrastructure components required for recovery, inclusive of contact lists and escalation trees.
Collaborate with application owners, infrastructure, network, security, database, and storage teams to ensure recovery requirements are built into architecture, change control, and deployment pipelines.
Ensure DR/BC plans satisfy industry standards and regulatory requirements (e.g., ISO 22301, SOC, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR) and support internal and external audits with required artifacts and evidence of testing.
Design and run communication plans for incident notification, internal and external stakeholder messaging, and customer-facing status updates during outages, including pre-approved templates and spokesperson coordination.
Create and deliver organization-wide DR/BC training, awareness campaigns, and role-based tabletop scenarios to ensure business units and IT staff understand responsibilities during an incident.
Maintain and test alternate sites, hot/cold/warm standby environments, failback procedures, and data replication schemes; verify network connectivity, DNS, IP plan, and security controls for failover sites.
Coordinate vendor and third-party resilience assessments and recovery responsibilities; lead supplier continuity reviews, penetration tests relevant to recoverability, and contract-based recovery SLAs.
Manage the DR budget and procure recovery-related technologies and services; justify investments in resiliency and present cost/benefit analyses to stakeholders.
Drive continuous improvement of the DR program through after-action reviews, root cause analysis, maturity assessments, and integration of automation to reduce recovery time and manual errors.
Align DR planning with enterprise continuity and crisis management programs — including physical security, facilities, HR, and legal — to ensure holistic organizational resilience.
Develop and enforce change control processes so that application upgrades, infrastructure changes, and deployments include validated recovery procedures and do not degrade recoverability.
Provide hands-on support and leadership during recovery operations, including executing runbooks for database restores, storage failovers, VM boot sequences, DNS updates, and application reconstitution as required.
Prepare and maintain documentation for regulators and auditors, including test evidence, risk assessments, BIA results, and documented remediation plans to demonstrate compliance and due diligence.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc recovery requests, post-incident root cause analysis, and investigative work into failed tests or operational incidents to recommend permanent fixes.
Contribute to the organization's broader resilience strategy and roadmap by providing technical input on cloud architecture, automation, and orchestration for faster recoveries.
Collaborate with business units to translate operational recovery needs into technical requirements, prioritized recovery sequences, and acceptance criteria.
Participate in sprint planning, change boards, and agile ceremonies as the DR/BC subject-matter representative to ensure new features and deployments include recoverability checks.
Assist internal audit and compliance teams in scoping tests, providing evidence, and remediating findings related to continuity and recoverability controls.
Maintain and improve the knowledge base of DR runbooks, recovery checklists, and documentation to reduce dependency on tribal knowledge during incidents.
Provide mentoring and training to junior continuity analysts and IT operations staff on recovery technologies, procedures, and incident coordination best practices.
Liaise with emergency services, local authorities, and crisis management teams when business continuity incidents escalate beyond IT impact.
Evaluate and pilot emerging resiliency technologies (container persistence, database replication, infrastructure orchestration) to shorten restoration windows and automate repetitive recovery tasks.
Track and report emerging threats, environmental risks, and geopolitical factors that could impact continuity planning and adjust DR priorities accordingly.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Planning (DRP/BCP development, testing, life‑cycle management)
Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Risk Assessment methodologies and tools
Backup and Restore technologies and practices (Veeam, Commvault, NetBackup, Bacula, native cloud backups)
Cloud DR architectures and tools (AWS Disaster Recovery, Azure Site Recovery, CloudEndure, cross-region replication)
Virtualization and orchestration platforms (VMware, Hyper-V, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible) for recovery automation
Storage replication, SAN/NAS recovery strategies, and database recovery (Oracle RMAN, SQL Server log shipping, MySQL/MariaDB replication)
Networking and connectivity recovery (VPN, DNS failover, load balancer reconfiguration, IP addressing strategies)
Incident Response coordination and Incident Command System (ICS) experience, including communications and escalation protocols
Regulatory compliance & audit readiness (ISO 22301, SOC, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR evidence and reporting)
Recovery metrics and monitoring tools (prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, ServiceNow CMDB integrations)
Vendor and third-party continuity management, SLA negotiation and contract review
Scripting and automation (PowerShell, Python, Bash) to automate recovery runbooks and validation tests
Change management and configuration management best practices to preserve recoverability during deployments
ITSM and ticketing systems (ServiceNow, JIRA) integration with DR workflows and incident tracking

Soft Skills

Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration with leadership, application owners, and external vendors
Clear, concise crisis communications and executive reporting under pressure
Analytical thinking and structured problem-solving for complex recovery scenarios and root cause analysis
Project management and program leadership to run DR initiatives and multi-disciplinary tests
Decision-making under stress with an ability to prioritize and sequence recovery activities
Attention to detail for documentation, compliance artifacts, and test evidence capture
Facilitation skills for tabletop exercises, workshops, and training sessions
Continuous improvement mindset with a focus on reducing manual work and increasing automation
Influence and negotiation skills to secure budget, resources, and vendor cooperation
Teaching and mentoring ability to upskill operational teams on recovery procedures

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Cybersecurity, Business Continuity, Risk Management, or related field; equivalent professional experience will be considered.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree in a related discipline or MBA with a focus on risk/resilience is a plus.
Professional certifications such as CBCP (Certified Business Continuity Professional), MBCP, CISSP, CISM, ITIL, or ISO 22301 Lead Implementer add strong differentiation.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science / Information Technology
Cybersecurity / Information Security
Business Continuity / Risk Management
Emergency Management / Crisis Management
Business Administration / Operations Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7 years in IT operations, disaster recovery, business continuity, or related roles; 5+ years preferred for larger enterprises.

Preferred:

Demonstrated experience owning an enterprise-level DR/BC program, including planning, testing, and audit support.
Hands-on experience executing restores and failover/failback for critical systems (databases, virtual environments, cloud services).
Proven success managing cross-functional teams and third-party vendors during high-severity incidents and scheduled DR tests.
Experience with cloud-native DR solutions and hybrid recovery architectures, including automation of recovery procedures.
Track record of delivering measurable improvement in recovery metrics (reduced MTTR, improved test pass rates, documented RTO/RPO compliance).