IT Disaster Recovery Manager

Who are we?

Howden is a global insurance group with employee ownership at its heart. Together, we have pushed the boundaries of insurance. We are united by a shared passion and no-limits mindset, and our strength lies in our ability to collaborate as a powerful international team comprised of 24,000 employees spanning over 56 countries.

People join Howden for many different reasons, but they stay for the same one: our culture. It’s what sets us apart, and the reason our employees have been turning down headhunters for years. Whatever your priorities – work / life balance, career progression, sustainability, volunteering – you’ll find like-minded people driving change at Howden.

Role Overview

The IT DR Manager is accountable for defining, implementing,testingandmaintainingthe 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,technologyrisk, 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, DRmethods, technical recovery standards and implemented a recovery tool.

The successful candidate will work closely with technology risk, on-net entities,infrastructure and applications tooperationalisethem.

Key Responsibilities:

DR Strategy & Framework

• Ensure that Howden Group Services(HGS)
  ITDRcapabilitycomply withtherecovery elements of the Group Technology Operational andResilience
  
  Frameworks.

• Input into Framework updates and improvements.

• Define end to end recoveryobjectivesfor infrastructure and technology services based that support business facing servicesRTO’s and RPO’s.

• Ensurethatbusiness facing services owners (entity,Groupinfrastructureand applications) are aware of their responsibilities andfollow the recovery elements of Group Technology Resilienceframework 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.

• Ensurethird partyDR solutions are designed, configured, andmaintainedto 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.

Recovery capability development and maintenance

• Ensure that new services that require DRrecovery solutionscan meettheirendtoendRTO and RPO.

• SupportM&Aactivities to ensure migrated applicationshave the correct level of DR capability and are on-boardedeffectivelyinto the wider group recovery end to end technical recovery capability.

• Working withdivisions/entities,HGS applications and entitiesdeveloptheendtoendrecovery sequences forOn-net hosted services. Ensure that these sequences aremaintainedeffectivelyin the Howden ITDR tool.

• Ensuresupporting recovery documentation(e.g. technical work instructions) ismaintainedeffectively forinfrastructure and technology service sand loaded into the recovery tool.

• Coordinate and track the update of entity andHGS applicationsDR documentation and their upload into the recovery tools.

• Ensure that DR technicalend to end recoverycapabilities aremaintainedas 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‑basedexercises, and resilience simulations.

• Validate test results…