Disaster Recovery Lead Manager

Recovery objectives that survive contact with the budget

Every business owner asked how long they could tolerate a system being down answers "not at all". Recovery time and recovery point objectives only become useful once someone attaches a cost to them.

A significant part of this course is that negotiation: running a business impact analysis that produces defensible objectives, and presenting the cost of meeting them so the organisation makes a conscious choice rather than an accidental one.

Runbooks written for the worst day

Disaster recovery documentation fails in predictable ways. It assumes the person executing it wrote it. It references systems that are themselves unavailable. It stores the only copy of the credentials inside the environment being recovered.

The course covers plan structure and content with those failure modes in mind.

Testing that tells you something

A backup that has never been restored is not a backup. The material on exercising covers the full range from tabletop walkthrough to complete failover, how to scope a test so a failure is informative rather than catastrophic, and how to handle the awkward finding that your recovery capability does not actually work.

What you will learn

• Explain disaster recovery concepts and how they relate to business continuity
• Conduct business impact analysis and set recovery objectives
• Select and design appropriate recovery strategies
• Document a disaster recovery plan that can be executed under pressure
• Design and run recovery tests, including full failover exercises
• Conduct post-incident review and maintain plan currency

Course content

1. 1. Disaster recovery fundamentals

   Concepts, terminology and the relationship to business continuity management.

2. 2. Business impact analysis

   Critical systems, dependency mapping, and setting RTOs and RPOs that are affordable.

3. 3. Recovery strategies

   Backup, replication, warm and hot standby, and cloud-based recovery options.

4. 4. Plan development

   Writing runbooks that work when the author is unavailable and systems are down.

5. 5. Testing and exercising

   Test types, designing meaningful exercises and handling failed tests.

6. 6. Incident response and review

   Invocation decisions, coordination during recovery, and post-incident analysis.

Exam and certification

Open-book written exam delivered online through PECB Exams.

Your fee includes your first exam attempt and one free retake within 12 months. After passing, you can apply for the relevant PECB credential.