Responsible for managing the development of a DR plan, a Disaster Recovery Coordinator (DRC) plays a critical role within an organization as they facilitate the ability to handle a disaster situation.
The overreaching goal of a DR Coordinator is to guarantee critical business functions failover successfully to a secondary site in an appropriate amount of time, while simultaneously mitigating business losses. This position involves managing a disaster recovery program while designing, developing, maintaining, and testing the DR plan for every critical system of an organization. In the event of a disaster, the DR coordinator may also play a key role in carrying out the DR plan.
Major Duties of a Disaster Recovery Coordinator:
- “Grand-Marshall” of failover and failback tests by guiding preparations, orchestrating resources and coordinating evaluation, assessment and reporting of results
- Performs a Risk and Threat Assessment to identify potential points of vulnerability.
- Manages the DR “system” (i.e. tools & techniques to distribute the DR plan and documentation and communications with the recovery team at time of disaster).
- Establishes disaster recovery testing strategy and methodologies.
- Ensures that DR contributors are oriented and familiar with DR planning approaches and they build the plan according to standard.
- Identifies, arranges and advises other contributors, especially third party suppliers critical for execution of the DR plan.
- Oversees and communicates with internal stakeholders that have a role or may be impacted throughout the DR planning life cycle (e.g. business, executive, IT).
- Creates and oversees DR plan maintenance process and advocates for “fully-imbedding” DR into day-to-day IT and business practices.
- Identifies Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs).
- Participates in actual plan execution (as available) at time of disaster.
A Disaster Recovery Coordinator is a part-time or full-time resource within the organization. The role must remain active, as DR plans require maintenance and frequent testing. From the initial stages of DR preparation, to the conducting of a complete failover – failback test, a DR Coordinator is involved in every aspect of the DR planning. Acting as the go-to expert (occasionally in time of crisis), a Coordinator must be experienced in handling large-scale disaster situations. They are the key component to a business’s ability to react successfully and utilizing a qualified individual is an organization’s best chance at recovery.
