Position Summary
The Backup & Disaster Recovery Specialist is responsible for implementing, maintaining, and testing backup and disaster recovery solutions to ensure the availability, integrity, and recoverability of critical IT systems and data. This role works closely with IT infrastructure, cloud, storage, and application teams to minimize downtime and protect business operations in the event of outages, disasters, or data loss.
Key Responsibilities
Backup Management
- Implement and maintain enterprise backup solutions for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
- Schedule, monitor, and verify backup jobs for servers, databases, virtual machines, applications, and endpoints.
- Ensure backup compliance with internal policies and regulatory standards (HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR, SOX).
- Perform routine backup audits, reporting, and capacity planning.
Disaster Recovery Planning
- Develop and maintain disaster recovery plans for IT systems, applications, and infrastructure.
- Define recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) in collaboration with business units.
- Implement replication, failover, and high-availability solutions to support rapid recovery.
- Participate in DR/BC exercises, testing recovery procedures and validating readiness.
Incident Response & Recovery
- Respond to backup or DR incidents to recover critical systems and data.
- Perform root cause analysis of backup failures and implement corrective actions.
- Coordinate with IT teams to restore systems during planned or unplanned outages.
Documentation & Reporting
- Maintain comprehensive documentation of backup procedures, DR plans, configurations, and recovery steps.
- Generate reports on backup health, compliance, and DR readiness for management.
- Recommend improvements to backup and DR processes, tools, and automation.
Collaboration & Continuous Improvement
- Work with server, storage, cloud, and application teams to ensure backup and DR coverage.
- Evaluate emerging backup, replication, and disaster recovery technologies.
- Train IT staff on backup and recovery best practices.
Qualifications
Required
- 3–5+ years of experience in backup management, disaster recovery, or IT operations.
- Experience with enterprise backup solutions (Veeam, Commvault, Veritas, NetBackup, Rubrik).
- Knowledge of virtualization, storage, cloud platforms, and database systems.
- Familiarity with RTO/RPO concepts, replication, failover, and recovery strategies.
- Strong problem-solving, analytical, and documentation skills.
Preferred
- Experience with cloud backup and disaster recovery (Azure Site Recovery, AWS Backup, Google Cloud).
- Certifications: CBCP (Certified Business Continuity Professional), DRII, MBCP, Veeam Certified Engineer.
- Scripting or automation skills for backup and DR processes.
- Understanding of compliance and regulatory requirements (HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI, GDPR).