Department
OPS ITS - Architecture, Integration and Security
About the Department
IT Services (ITS) collaborates with campus partners to support the mission of the University of Chicago through the consistent delivery of high-quality solutions and services. We provide secure, stable, and reliable infrastructure and applications that support the mission of the University. ITS supports and enables faculty research and teaching with the effective use of technology, simplifies the technology experience for all users, identifies, manages, and mitigates technology risks for the University.
Job Summary
The Disaster Recovery and Resiliency Specialist supports the University's technology resiliency program within the Information Security Office, helping ensure the University can recover its critical systems and data after a serious disruption such as cyberattacks such as ransomware, destructive attacks, and compromise of identity systems, as well as conventional outages, facility events, and failures at cloud and software vendors. Working independently with minimal guidance, the Disaster Recovery and Resiliency Specialist assists in developing the resiliency strategy and recovery requirements, coordinates testing to verify that ITS and campus teams can meet them, and helps report recovery risk to the CISO and University leadership. ITS service owners continue to own and operate the recovery solutions for their systems. This role supports the standard, coordinates testing against it, and tracks gaps to closure.
The Disaster Recovery and Resiliency Specialist also works with the campus community, University of Chicago Medical Center, UChicago Global, the University's emergency management and business continuity functions, and others to understand their recovery needs and to coordinate on shared infrastructure and shared risks. This role also serves as a resource to colleagues on recovery practices.
Responsibilities
Assists in developing and maintaining the IT resiliency strategy and multi-year roadmap.
Helps develop and maintain the University's IT backup and recovery standard, including requirements for backup immutability, isolation from production networks and credentials, encryption, retention, and recovery testing frequency.
Maintains the criticality tiers for University systems and the recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) assigned to each, working with system owners and the University's business continuity function on the business impact analysis.
Serves as ISO's point of contact for resiliency architecture, and reviews new systems and major changes for recoverability before they go into production.
Reviews requests for exceptions to the standard and recommends approval or denial to the CISO.
Develops and maintains the annual recovery testing and exercise program, prioritized by system criticality.
Plans, facilitates, and reports on technical recovery tests and tabletop exercises covering both conventional outages and cyber scenarios, including ransomware, destructive attacks, compromise of identity and privileged access systems, loss of a cloud region or major software-as-a-service provider, and a faulty vendor update affecting many systems at once.
Verifies backups can be restored within the required RTO and RPO, restored data is free of tampering or malware, and recovery does not reintroduce an attacker's access.
Coordinates joint exercises with the incident response team and with University leadership.
Tracks remediation of test findings to closure.
Helps ensure the incident response plan and recovery plans work together, including the decision points for isolating systems, declaring a disaster, and restoring from known-good copies.
Helps define the recovery order for foundational services such as identity, DNS, core network, privileged access, and the backup infrastructure itself, and plan for recovery when normal tools, accounts, and communication channels are unavailable.
Maintains offline…