Disaster Recovery Analyst

Most days mix recovery plan documentation, test design and facilitation, technology assessments, and the steady work of keeping runbooks current as the environment changes. You'll often work alongside infrastructure, application, and security teams — your job is understanding which systems support which business functions well enough to recover them in the right order and within the right time windows. RTOs and RPOs frame much of the planning, but the day-to-day reality is often more about dependency mapping than mathematical recovery objectives.

What's harder than people expect is maintaining accuracy in a changing environment. Architectures evolve, new applications come online, dependencies shift, vendors change — and a runbook that worked six months ago can be dangerously stale today. The work tends to be quietly preventive most of the time, then central during an actual incident or annual test. Cloud and SaaS adoption has changed the DR shape significantly over the past decade.

People who tend to thrive here are technically curious, comfortable with cross-system thinking, and patient about work that pays off only in scenarios that may not happen. The role tends to be a strong path to DR manager, resilience director, or technical risk leadership. The trade-off is that the role can feel like preparing for problems that never come, until they do — and then it becomes suddenly very visible.