what to do to get into disaster recovery/backup administrator roles?

jabokim

Are certifications important in this field, and if so which ones? What is the typical path that is taken to get into the disaster recovery/backup field? Any info regarding this would be greatly appreciated!

bridgestone

I'd say those are two almost totally different fields. Sure, in a DR situation you might restore from backup. Though these days you are more likely to be automatically mirroring at least on a daily basis and not waiting for tapes to whirr up. Plus, DR is more than just restoring/ensuring data - it's also about making sure you have a ready, maintained environment ready to go.

Sadly these jobs are so few and far between. I've thought about them as working in a quiet datacenter with no other people is a small dream of mine

For backup administrator roles, I'd say get into storage. Backups and storage are synonymous with each other. If it wasn't for the cloud, I'd say it was one of the strongest areas in Infrastructure. It remains to be seen what happens in the future though. Will SANs be used less often because of the cloud?

nachodba

I would recommend going for a systems admin position and finding out who handles the backups. At that point, ask them to show you the ropes. After they have trust in you, then you probably would be able to take over as the primary tech for backups.

I was turned into my last company's backup administrator when the old one left. I had to pretty much re-architect the backup solution because we did not cover the required RTO / RPO SLAs. There are a TON of backup solutions (Microsoft DPM, Native Windows Server backup, NetBackup, vRanger, Backup Exec...) that all have different ways of protecting data. You need to have a good understanding of the applications you will be backing up also (You need to know if you are backing up SQL and the database is in Full Recovery that you need to do transaction log backups as an example).

Cyberscum

As a technical admin or manager admin. If manager CISSP, or not, I dunno?

broli720

I've never seen a dedicated role for this. Usually it's part of the job description of a system admin or network security analyst. For instance, DR or backup functions will would be part of the scope of whatever admin set up your IP360 environment. There aren't any certs for this either and if there, it's not worth while.

Focus on the system admin route and you'll naturally get this responsibility.

ajs1976

Domains related to it are included in the CISSP and the SSCP. Another term is Business Continuity Planning (BCP) or the government term is Continuity of Operations Planning (COOP). Both BCP and COOP are more on the planning, management and logistic components, while DR is usually more technical.

ec-council has(had?) a certification which I have looked into a couple of times, but it doesn't look like it is being maintained anymore so probably a dead end.

https://www.drii.org/ and The Business Continuity Institute offer training and certifications but I have never been sure of the value of either.

Take a look at Welcome to Disaster Recovery Journal. DRJ offers some webinars and articles.

Larger organizations may have dedicated roles. I know my previous employer had a team of system engineers that specialized in backups and it had a whole department for BCP while the regular engineers built and maintained the DR environment.

Verities

As ajs described, we roll the same way over here. We have a BCP/COOP manager, who handles all of the paperwork and is non technical, while myself and another guy manage the technical DR solution (VMware SRM). I sort of had it tacked on as an additional duty since I was shadowing the other guy who implemented the solution.

SixtyCycle

I work at a NOC as an sys/net admin and handle all backup solution for our (60+) clients. There is no need to have a dedicated position for it because once everything is set, (configuration, agent install on servers) and confirmed that backup is running, it is pretty much a solid system. Most backup failure issues can be resolved from restarting the backup services or rebooting the BDR remotely. There are complicated issues now and then but it doesn't require a team nor a dedicated person working 40 hours to resolve it. I work primarily with Datto, Symantec and the now defunct Zenith systems.