Director, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

IQVIA•Durham, NC

About The Position

The Director of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery provides enterprise leadership for organizational resilience, ensuring the company can anticipate, withstand, and recover from disruptive events. This role is critical to protecting people, operations, and customer commitments, and requires strong stakeholder management across business units, IT, facilities, legal, HR, risk, and executive leadership to drive alignment, sponsorship, and timely decision-making. The Director will be expected to evolve the current set of Business Continuity processes, procedures and practices into a scalable program framework, including a clear policy, standards, roles and responsibilities, lifecycle management, and reporting. The role drives consistent processes for business impact analysis, risk assessment, continuity strategy selection, plan development, training, and exercising—while enabling business ownership and accountability. Success requires demonstrated experience operating in large, complex, and federated environments, partnering across diverse functions and geographies to implement common requirements without disrupting business agility. The Director will also lead the development and continual improvement of Disaster Recovery capabilities for technology services and critical platforms, aligning recovery objectives with business needs and regulatory expectations. The role partners with infrastructure, application, and service owners to define DR strategies (including backup/restore, replication, and alternate processing), maintain runbooks, and execute validation through tabletop and technical exercises. The Director also coordinates recovery readiness metrics, remediation of gaps, and incident-time governance to ensure rapid, controlled restoration of prioritized services. In addition, the Director supports physical security and employee safety by partnering with facilities, security operations, HR, and leadership to reduce workplace risk and enhance preparedness. This includes oversight of key security technologies and controls (e.g., access control and video surveillance), development of safety and emergency response procedures, and coordination of communications, training, and awareness. The role ensures programs are measurable, auditable, and integrated with crisis management to protect employees, visitors, and sites globally. As a direct manager, the Director leads a small, high-impact team and is accountable for day-to-day performance, capability development, and continuous improvement across the program portfolio. Given the lean team structure, the role requires disciplined prioritization and effective allocation of resources to the highest-risk and highest-value activities, while setting clear expectations with IT, business, and other stakeholders. Success depends on driving outcomes through influence—aligning stakeholders to shared objectives, removing obstacles, and enabling the team to execute efficiently in a complex, matrixed environment.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree- Business Administration, Information Technology, Risk Management, or a related field, or equivalent experience
Minimum of 7-10 years of experience in multiple relevant disciplines, such as employee safety, business continuity, disaster recovery, and risk management, with at least 3 years in a leadership role.
Strong project management, communication, and analytical skills.
Experience with regulatory compliance frameworks and crisis management.

Responsibilities

Lead and evolve the business continuity and disaster recovery programs at IQVIA, taking them from current state to well documented, transparent governance functions aligned with organizational goals, customer expectations and regulatory requirements.
Conduct risk assessments and business impact analyses to identify critical operations, dependencies, and potential threats.
Work closely with businesses to design, document, and regularly update business continuity and disaster recovery plans, policies, and procedures.
Work with newly formed or acquired businesses to create or integrate their plans into the IQVIA model.
Coordinate and execute periodic plan testing, including tabletop exercises and full-scale simulations.
Serve as the primary point of contact during incidents, coordinating recovery efforts and communication across departments and with external stakeholders.
Crisis management and communications.
Revamp and run the global alerting tool.
Maintain data quality.
Some privacy knowledge.
Run and support physical security systems, including building access control and CCTV/video surveillance systems.
Partner with key stakeholders to develop, implement, and continuously improve employee safety programs, including incident response, communications, and training.
Monitor industry trends, regulatory changes, and emerging risks to continuously improve organizational resilience.
Manage the direct BC/DR team and physical security systems team, driving performance and efficiency.