Business Continuity Manager (Coop & DR)

Job Title: Business Continuity Manager (COOP and DR)
Location: Montgomery, AL (Onsite)
12 months + Contract with potential extension/conversion                   
Position Description
The Business Continuity Manager is responsible for developing, implementing, and maintaining the organization’s business continuity and disaster recovery programs. This role ensures organizational resilience by leading enterprise-wide COOP planning, disaster recovery strategies, risk assessments, and coordinated response activities. The manager will work closely with cross-functional teams to ensure critical business functions can continue during and after disruptive events. The disaster recovery manager plays a key role in keeping businesses running when things go wrong, especially in a multi‑vendor environment where coordination is more complex. A disaster recovery manager in a multi‑vendor environment is responsible for ensuring business continuity across multiple organizations, coordinating people, technology, and processes so that operations can recover quickly and consistently after any disruption. Work with various module vendors simultaneously, ensuring a smooth transition of updated and new systems, applications, or services from the development to the production environment.
 
Key Responsibilities:
• Lead the development, execution, and maintenance of the organization’s Business Continuity (BC), Continuity of Operations (COOP), and Disaster Recovery (DR) programs.
• Conduct business impact analyses (BIAs) to identify critical functions, dependencies, recovery objectives, and areas of risk.
• Develop and maintain COOP plans, DR plans, crisis management protocols, and recovery procedures.
• Oversee annual testing exercises for COOP and DR, including tabletop exercises, failover tests, simulations, and after-action reviews.
• Partner with IT and MES partners to maintain the DR strategy and infrastructure necessary to support recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
• Ensure contractor plans meet regulatory, industry, and internal compliance standards.
• Maintain a coordinated governance structure for business continuity across departments.
• Provide training, awareness, and guidance to business units on COOP and DR best practices.
• Lead response efforts during incidents, serving as a primary coordinator for continuity and recovery activities.
• Prepare regular metrics, reports, and updates for leadership on continuity readiness and risk posture.
 
Designs and Maintains the Disaster Recovery Strategy
• They create and update plans that ensure critical systems can be restored after:
• Cyberattacks
• Natural disasters
• Hardware failures
• Human error
• Supplier outages
• In a multi-company setup, this includes aligning DR standards across all companies.
 
Coordinates COOP activities Across Multiple Organizations
• The Business Continuity Manager must:
o Work with IT teams from each vendor
o Ensure each entity follows aligned recovery policies
o Manage different systems, vendors, contracts, and technologies
o Create shared communication channels for emergencies
o They act as the central point that keeps all companies synchronized
o Provide business wide responsibility for COOP employment in accordance with regulatory guidelines
o Ensures Medicaid agency continues to operate regardless of event or incident type.
Oversee Backups and Replication
• Ensure contractor partners perform regular backups
• Data stored at contractor sites is secure and available at a hot site
• Recovery objectives (RTO/RPO) are met across all systems
• Manage cross-company backup solutions such as cloud replication.
Runs Disaster Recovery Testing
• They coordinate periodic drills to verify that:
• Recovery procedures work
• Cross-company communication is effective
• Systems can be restored in the required time. This may involve simulated
cyberattacks or full failover tests.
Handles Compliance and Documentation
• In a multi-company environment, compliance is often big:
• SOC 2
• HIPAA
• ISO 27001
• Internal audit requirements
• The DR manager ensures all companies maintain the required documentation and pass audits.
Leads Incident Response During Actual Disasters
• If something breaks, the DR manager acts as:
• Coordinator
• Communicator
• Decision facilitator
• They bring together IT teams from all companies, evaluate the damage, and manage the restoration efforts.
Manages Third-Party Vendors
• Business Continuity Manager oversees:
o Cloud providers
o Data centers
o Software vendors
o Cybersecurity
o Backup services
o Ensure vendor SLAs support the disaster recovery strategy.
 
Skills Required
• Strong understanding of IT infrastructure (servers, networks, storage, virtualization
• Knowledge of cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP, etc)
• Knowledge of Cloud configurations and service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS
• Backup and replication technologies (Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik, Zerto, etc.)
• Experience with disaster recovery tools and failover systems
• Understanding of cybersecurity threats and incident response
• Knowledge of business continuity frameworks (ISO 22301, NIST, ITIL)
• Ability to design RTO/RPO requirements
• Familiarity with compliance standards (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, etc.)
 
Skills Preferred
• Managing cross‑vendor projects
• Prioritizing tasks and timelines
• Building and maintaining DR playbooks
• Running DR drills and tabletop exercises
• Risk assessment and impact analysis
• Vendor and contract management
• Calm under pressure
• Root‑cause analysis
• Identifying process or technology weaknesses
• Scenario planning and threat modeling
• Data‑driven decision making
• Clear communication during crises
 
Experience Required
• 5+ years of experience in business continuity, disaster recovery, crisis management, or related area.
• Strong knowledge of COOP methodologies, DR frameworks, and industry standards (e.g., ISO 22301, NIST, FEMA).
• Experience conducting BIAs, risk assessments, and continuity planning for mid- to-large organizations.
• Demonstrated ability to facilitate and lead cross-functional teams during planning and incident response.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
 
Experience Preferred
• Experience with ServiceNow
• Experience working in an environment with multiple vendors
 
Education Desired
Bachelor’s degree in Business, Emergency Management, Information Technology, or related field (or equivalent experience).