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Role Overview
The IT DR Manager is accountable for defining, implementing, testing and maintaining the organisation's IT Disaster Recovery (DR) across a regulated, global insurance environment.
The role ensures that critical infrastructure, platforms, and applications are recoverable in line with agreed recovery objectives, regulatory expectations, and operational resilience requirements.
Working closely with infrastructure service managers, security, technology risk, compliance, and third‑party vendors, the IT DR Manager provides governance, oversight, and assurance that DR strategies, plans, testing, and documentation remain effective, current, and auditable.
The role is heavily vendor‑dependent, with responsibility for ensuring outsourced providers deliver DR services in line with contractual and regulatory obligations.
Finally, Howden has developed new Technology resilience frameworks, DR methods, technical recovery standards and implemented a recovery tool. The successful candidate will work closely with technology risk, on-net entities, infrastructure and applications to operationalise them.
Key Responsibilities:
DR Strategy & Framework
- Ensure that Howden Group Services (HGS) ITDR capability comply with the recovery elements of the Group Technology Operational and Resilience Frameworks.
- Input into Framework updates and improvements.
- Define end to end recovery objectives for infrastructure and technology services based that support business facing services RTO's and RPO's.
- Ensure that business facing services owners (entity, Group infrastructure and applications) are aware of their responsibilities and follow the recovery elements of Group Technology Resilience framework and supporting guidance.
DR Service Management & Vendor Oversight
- Provide governance and oversight of outsourced vendors delivering DR capabilities, including backup, recovery, replication, and failover services.
- Ensure third party DR solutions are designed, configured, and maintained to meet agreed resilience targets.
- Review vendor deliverables including DR plans, technical designs, test results, and remediation actions.
- Monitor service performance, risks, and compliance against SLAs, KPIs, and contractual requirements.
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Recovery capability development and maintenance
- Ensure that new services that require DR recovery solutions can meet their end to end RTO and RPO.
- Support M&A activities to ensure migrated applications have the correct level of DR capability and are on-boarded effectively into the wider group recovery end to end technical recovery capability.
- Working with divisions/entities, HGS applications and entities develop the end to end recovery sequences for On-net hosted services. Ensure that these sequences are maintained effectively in the Howden ITDR tool.
- Ensure supporting recovery documentation (e.g. technical work instructions) is maintained effectively for infrastructure and technology services and loaded into the recovery tool.
- Coordinate and track the update of entity and HGS applications DR documentation and their upload into the recovery tools.
- Ensure that DR technical end to end recovery capabilities are maintained as the production environments change.
- Maintain inventories of recoverable systems, dependencies, recovery tiers, and criticality classifications. This will involve ensure that these are effectively flagged within the CMDB.
DR Testing & Assurance
- Plan, coordinate, and oversee regular DR testing exercises, including technical recovery tests, scenario‑based exercises, and resilience simulations.
- Validate test results against recovery objectives and track remediation actions to closure.
- Provide assurance reporting to the Head of Service and Compliance and relevant governance forums.
Risk, Compliance & Audit
- Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements relating to operational resilience, outsourcing, and technology risk (e.g. FCA/PRA or equivalent global regulators).
- Support internal and external audits, regulatory reviews, and assurance activities.
- Identify, assess, and report DR‑related risks and control gaps, ensuring mitigation plans are in place.
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Stakeholder Engagement & Reporting
- Act as the primary point of contact for IT DR across Infrastructure & Operations, Entities/Division, Enterprise applications and Business Systems.
- Work closely with Infrastructure Service Managers, Architecture, Technology Risk Security, and Business Continuity teams.
- Produce clear, concise reporting on DR posture, test outcomes, risks, and improvement plans.
Continuous Improvement
- Drive continuous improvement of DR capabilities, tooling, testing maturity, and documentation quality.
- Identify opportunities to enhance resilience through automation, modern cloud‑based recovery solutions, and improved vendor practices.
Qualifications and Experience:
Essential
- Proven experience in an IT Disaster Recovery and Technology Resilience, within a complex, regulated environment.
- Strong understanding of infrastructure and platform recovery across on‑prem, hybrid, and cloud environments.
- Demonstrable experience managing outsourced DR services and third‑party providers.
- Solid knowledge of DR, BCP, and operational resilience frameworks and best practices.
- Experience planning and executing DR tests and audits, including managing follow‑up actions.
- Strong stakeholder management, communication, and documentation skills.
Desirable
- Experience within insurance or financial services.
- Knowledge of regulatory expectations (e.g. FCA, PRA, EBA, or equivalent).
- ITIL, ISO 22301, or operational resilience‑related certifications.
- Familiarity with cloud‑native DR solutions (e.g. Azure resilience patterns).
- Experience with orchestration tools (e.g. Cutover).
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