What are the key skills and competencies that you need as an IT infrastructure disaster recovery manager?

Having a robust grasp of IT infrastructure components is essential for effectively supporting organizational operations and objectives. This entails understanding servers, networks, storage, databases, applications, and cloud services comprehensively. By assessing risks, vulnerabilities, and dependencies across these components, IT professionals can prioritize critical areas needing heightened protection and recovery strategies. Familiarity with IT infrastructure disaster recovery (ITIDR) tools and technologies is equally crucial. This includes proficiency in backup systems, replication software, failover mechanisms, and recovery sites, all essential for restoring infrastructure functionality promptly.

8 Dimensions Of Resiliency : 1. Disaster Recovery 2. Durability 3. Observability 4. Change Management 5. Redudancy 6. Scalability 7. Testing 8. Operation

Although technical competencies, risk assessment, toolings, capabilities are all extremely important, it's probably more important to know your technical people, their experience, their limitations and how to support them. Being the cool head with the plan is your focus, with 1 goal, restoration - you're in the Apollo 11 capsule, your people are the objects on the table, now turn them into the CO2 scrubber !

Planning and design skills are essential for developing a robust IT infrastructure disaster recovery (ITIDR) strategy that aligns closely with organizational goals, priorities, and budgetary constraints. Conducting a thorough business impact analysis (BIA) is fundamental, as it helps determine critical recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) for each IT component. This analysis informs the identification of recovery scenarios and the selection of appropriate solutions to meet these requirements. Documentation and regular updates of the ITIDR plan, policies, and procedures are crucial aspects of ensuring readiness and compliance with standards, regulations, and best practices.

Now you need to take that plan to your working group and ask them to poke as many holes in it as possible - tell you why it won't work, where investment is required, where your circular dependencies are and where you have made assumptions that don't work in the real world. Collaboration with your SME's who live and breathe the technologies and strategies needs to be brought into the design element, too often do we "tick the boxes" when we need to be "taking off the blinkers"

Implementation and testing skills are critical for ensuring the effectiveness and reliability of an IT infrastructure disaster recovery (ITIDR) strategy. This involves configuring and deploying ITIDR tools and technologies while seamlessly integrating them into the existing IT environment. Performing regular and realistic tests and drills, such as backups, restores, failovers, and simulations, is essential to validate ITIDR capabilities and readiness. During testing, IT professionals must meticulously review and analyze results and feedback to identify any deficiencies or gaps in the strategy.

Table top exercises, wargames and real world scenarios. Look at the challenges some of the worlds largest companies have experienced in real-world scenarios - could you cope with that? what would you do? Learn from the mistakes of others, it's a great head start to make sure you don't repeat small errors in otherwise great strategies. An often overlooked approach - involve your vendors, challenge them to show you how their tools already do what you need.

Communication and coordination skills are crucial for orchestrating an effective IT infrastructure disaster recovery (ITIDR) process involving diverse stakeholders and teams. This entails establishing clear and consistent communication channels and protocols to ensure that all parties, including senior management, business units, IT staff, vendors, and external partners, are well-informed and aligned with ITIDR objectives, roles, responsibilities, and expectations.

I tend to lean towards a simple idiom (thanks Brene Brown) Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. Practice what needs to be said when it all goes wrong, have a template of options pre-prepared, know what message you want to convey. Comms are so important you should never think of them as "just another thing to do", give them clear planning time, don't write them on the fly, get them reviewed by someone who is not close to the action and ask for a review of "tone. As anyone who has been in the unfortunate position to experience it will tell you, you WILL spend more time repeatedly re-explaining an error in comms than you could ever imagine. you don't need this, your recipients don't need this, your mental health doesn't need this.

Great leaders encourage learning from reflection - ensure your team are keeping notes in the margins of things that they want to discuss when things calm down. Make time for this. When you have less experienced hands, make sure they are noting all questions, it's probably not appropriate to coach during, but make sure they are engaged, point out positive contributors, good behaviours, key competencies when they are displayed by others and ask them to take notes for comparison later.

Leadership and management skills are essential for effectively guiding an IT infrastructure disaster recovery (ITIDR) team and ensuring the success of the ITIDR process. As a leader in ITIDR, it is crucial to set a clear vision and strategic direction that aligns with the organization's mission and values. This involves defining goals, objectives, and priorities for the ITIDR strategy, while fostering a shared understanding and commitment among team members. Motivating and empowering the ITIDR team is another critical aspect of leadership. By cultivating a culture of trust, collaboration, and innovation, leaders can inspire team members to perform at their best and contribute to the success of ITIDR initiatives.

The greatest obstacle to improved security; MANAGEMENT Yes , it’s true You have a great idea on how you can approve security posture. You bring it to management, and instead of giving you the go ahead on your great idea, they give you a lot of hoops to jump through. Then when you jump through those, they give you more hoops! Then, you give up which, is what they really wanted because they didn’t want it to come out of their budget. That is, until there is an incident that your plan would have solved. Remember “If we don’t know about it, it didn’t happen” . See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. The three primary tenets of corporate security.