Disaster Recovery Manager

About the Organization

We are dedicated to ensuring business operations remain resilient and recoverable during technology failures, cyberattacks, natural calamities, infrastructure outages, and other unforeseen disruptions. Our comprehensive resilience program spans IT, Cybersecurity, Business Continuity, Risk, Compliance, Infrastructure, Applications, Data, Operations, and Executive leadership to quickly restore essential services.

Role Overview

The Disaster Recovery Manager will spearhead the disaster recovery strategy, planning, testing, governance, and ongoing enhancement efforts for the organization. This role involves developing and sustaining disaster recovery capabilities, coordinating recovery drills, evaluating technology and business risks, defining recovery requirements, tracking readiness, and confirming that vital systems can be restored within targeted timelines and objectives.

Key Duties

• Direct and manage disaster recovery program operations and preparedness activities.
• Create, update, and enhance the enterprise-wide disaster recovery strategy.
• Formulate disaster recovery policies, standards, frameworks, and governance mechanisms.
• Align recovery capabilities with business aims, risk tolerance, compliance needs, and organizational priorities.
• Define roles, responsibilities, escalation protocols, and authorizations within disaster recovery.
• Maintain governance structures ensuring executive oversight.
• Collaborate closely with teams across Business Continuity, Cybersecurity, IT Infrastructure, Applications, Cloud, Data, Operations, Risk, Compliance, and senior management.
• Conduct and oversee Business Impact Analyses to identify critical processes, applications, infrastructure, data, vendors, and dependencies.
• Determine Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) jointly with business and technology stakeholders.
• Identify allowable downtime and recovery needs for essential services.
• Map interdependencies among processes, systems, infrastructure, personnel, facilities, and third parties.
• Maintain accurate inventories of critical assets and dependencies.
• Perform disaster recovery risk evaluations, identifying vulnerabilities and single points of failure across data centers, cloud, networks, applications, databases, telecoms, utilities, suppliers, and technology dependencies.
• Develop mitigation strategies and manage risk registers, tracking remediation efforts.
• Assess recovery capabilities versus required RTOs and RPOs, highlight gaps, and prioritize remediation accordingly.
• Design disaster recovery architectures and strategies in partnership with technology teams, considering options like backup, replication, failover, high availability, alternate processing sites, and cloud recovery solutions.
• Coordinate recovery requirements across on-premises, cloud, hybrid, and distributed systems, ensuring backup and retention meet criteria for frequency, encryption, integrity, and geographic separation.
• Ensure regular restoration testing of backup solutions and monitor recovery environments and standby systems.
• Maintain detailed disaster recovery plans, runbooks, procedures, contact lists, escalation matrices, inventories, and dependency maps.
• Lead and coordinate periodic disaster recovery exercises, including tabletop scenarios, technical tests, application recovery drills, infrastructure failovers, and full-scale simulations, while documenting outcomes and tracking corrective measures.
• Prepare and present comprehensive reports on disaster recovery readiness, testing outcomes, risk remediation, and compliance to senior leadership and governance committees.
• Support cybersecurity resilience planning related to ransomware, malware, data corruption, credential compromise, ensuring recovery procedures are adapted for compromised environments.
• Manage disaster recovery responses in actual incidents, activating recovery plans, coordinating teams, communication, incident escalation, logging recovery actions and timelines.

Performance Indicators

• Compliance with RTO and RPO targets.
• Success rates of disaster recovery tests and restoration exercises.
• Coverage of critical systems and applications in recovery plans.
• Currency and accuracy of recovery documentation.
• Recovery readiness metrics and remediation of disaster recovery risks.
• Participation rates in exercises and timeliness of corrective actions.
• Audit compliance and integration with business continuity.

Candidate Profile and Requirements

• Proven experience in disaster recovery, IT service continuity, business continuity, operational resilience, infrastructure, or technology risk management.
• Strong grasp of disaster recovery concepts, methodologies, governance, and associated risk assessments including Business Impact Analysis.
• Familiarity with RTO, RPO, recovery plans, backup, replication, failover, redundancy, and related recovery technologies.
• Experience with enterprise IT environments covering cloud, data centers, networks, databases, applications, and infrastructure recovery.
• Understanding of cybersecurity recovery and resilience concepts.
• Excellent project management, analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills.
• Relevant tertiary qualification in Information Technology, Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Business Continuity, Risk Management, Engineering, or closely related fields.
• Professional certifications such as CBCP, MBCI, ISO 22301, ITIL, CISSP, CISM, or other disaster recovery and resilience credentials are advantageous.
• Experience working within UAE or Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) regulatory environments is highly preferred.
• Proficiency in Arabic is a beneficial asset.