About Steve Tower

With an extensive background in disaster recovery, risk management and business continuity, Steve Tower understands the value of protecting businesses from risks and exposures. He has seen disaster recovery from a variety of perspectives and has the ability to create and fine tune plans at any stage of the program, as well as successfully integrate new systems or recovery sites.

Upon earning a B.A.Sc. in Engineering from the University of Toronto, Tower began his career as an IT consultant to Fortune 500 companies. Moving out of the consulting role, he joined a major professional services firm as the CIO where he managed and maintained the systems infrastructure in order to reduce the exposure of the business to different types of threats. During his tenure, he experienced the full breadth of disaster recovery and how it relates to business continuity, pandemic and emergency response planning.

He conducted business impact analyses and created an enterprise-wide disaster recovery strategy. He led the construction and successful testing of application recovery at the recovery site for the highest priority services and led projects to implement emergency power systems in two office towers.

After serving as a CIO, Tower shifted his focus to become a consultant in the area of disaster recovery. For a real estate company, he led an evaluation of disaster recovery plans and practices, using a maturity model and checklist to identify gaps in their program. He then conducted a cost-benefit analysis of proposed initiatives and constructed a prioritized roadmap for improvement.

When there is no plan in place, as in the case of a commercial property manager, he created a disaster recovery strategy from scratch, using a “checklist” plan that integrates with pandemic and business continuity plans. Similarly, Tower helped design new disaster recovery infrastructure and a “hot site” when the ERP systems were being rebuilt at a high-tech manufacturer. He also created disaster recovery guidelines for a federal government department.

In his current roles at Blue Catalyst, and as one of the leaders of AMI Business Resilience, he manages disaster recovery planning projects and employs strategic methods for creating, implementing and maintaining plans to ensure their success. Using his vast knowledge base, he is the link that integrates disaster recovery planning with business continuity, pandemic and emergency response planning. To round out his skill set, he is a Professional Engineer (P.Eng.), Certified Management Consultant (CMC), Project Management Professional (PMP) and a Member of the Business Continuity Institute (MBCI).