I recently had a call for an interview in Disaster Recovery field, as Infrastructure Analyst - Disaster Recovery. This is sound quite new to me, which I found it is quite interesting field to gain experience in it. To understand this role, I need to understand what is Disaster Recovery is. According to Wikipedia, Disaster Recovery (DR) is a process, policies, or procedures related to preparing the recovery or continuation of critical technology infrastructure or network after the disaster happen.
Basically Disaster Recovery Analyst works in the discipline of Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity Management. The role is to plan to mitigate / lessen the risk of business process, in the event where the disaster happen. Disaster here means either human made disaster, such as terrorist attack, power interruption, human fault, hackers, building on fire or natural disaster such as flood, hurricane, typhoon or earthquake. As a Disaster Recovery Analyst (DRA), my role is to work closely with technical team, identify the risk and the network elements, what to recover, plan for recovery, and ensure the support is meet the requirement. Things to look at when planning for recvery is:
1) Identify the scope and limitation of BCP.
2) the study of business impact, so called as BIA (Business Impact Analysis)
3) sell the BIA to upper management, to get organization and financial commitment.
4) Each department will need to understand the role and support the plan to maintain it.
5) National Instititue of standard has providing tools to help in doing BCP.
This field is very wide, and the career path is there to explore. It has an international body (kind of same like CISCO Engineer who has Cisco academy) which providing a certifications to the people who wants to become disaster recovery expert. The certifications are awarded by BCM Institute. The career path started with BCCP (Business continuity certified planner) , follow by BCCS (Business Continuity Certified Specialist), followed by BCCE (Business Continuity Certified Expert) and the DRCS (Disaster Recovery Certified Specialist) and the final is DRCE (Disaster Recovery Certified Expert).
Nowadays many companies are into this field, as per research, HP and IBM is one of the major player in DRP industry. Many of the companies now running business online, their business and system are very dependent on the internet and network. Every system in the world now rely on data center, where store all information / data related to a company growth and business. One hour of network interruption will cause the lose behind. That is why DRP/BCP is very important nowadays. Majority companies putting 2% - 4% of their budget in disaster recovery planning, to avoid bigger losses in future.
Moving forward, I am planning to pursue my career in this field, I will be start of my career in this company, then will pursue some certifications in this interesting field.
Please wish me luck!
