Application Portfolio And IT Service Continuity Governance Lead

Job Overview

The Application Portfolio & IT Service Continuity Lead is responsible for governing and shaping the strategy for IT service continuity across applications and services. This role defines and enforces continuity policies, ensuring disaster recovery readiness for critical applications through compliance oversight and testing governance—not hands-on execution. The Lead works across teams to validate recovery objectives, testing strategies, and adherence to enterprise standards. In addition, this position manages the governance and quality of the application portfolio—including the Configuration Management Database (CMDB)—to maintain accurate data, proper tiering, recovery strategy designation, and risk classification. By integrating continuity governance with application portfolio management, the role provides a holistic framework that ensures resilience, audit readiness, and reliable operational data for incident response and disaster recovery scenarios.

A Day In The Life

In this role, you spend your time ensuring that the enterprise application portfolio and service continuity practices are accurate, compliant, and aligned to business needs.

You regularly review and govern application portfolio and CMDB data, validating ownership, tiering, dependencies, lifecycle status, and recovery classifications to ensure the data can be relied upon during audits, incidents, or recovery scenarios. You work closely with application and service owners to confirm that recovery objectives (RTO/RPO) and tiering reflect real business impact and risk.

A significant part of the role involves defining and enforcing disaster recovery and IT service continuity policies. You oversee DR planning and testing governance, ensuring that responsible teams execute exercises, document outcomes, and track remediation actions. While you do not perform recovery activities yourself, you hold teams accountable to enterprise standards and regulatory expectations.

You collaborate across IT, risk, and audit functions to support internal and external audits related to continuity, operational processes, and system ownership. Along the way, you identify opportunities to improve data quality, automate validation, and introduce metrics that reduce manual effort while improving governance effectiveness.

• Govern and maintain the enterprise Application Portfolio and CMDB as the single source of truth, ensuring accurate ownership, tiering, dependencies, and lifecycle data.
• Optimize and govern the application tiering and classification strategy based on business to drive RPO/RTO targets.
• Define and enforce data governance and operational compliance standards, including documentation, SLAs, and audit readiness.
• Establish and oversee Disaster Recovery (DR) policies, plans, and testing to meet RTO/RPO targets and regulatory requirements.
• Ensure DR exercises are conducted by responsible teams and that outcomes and remediation actions are tracked to support readiness and compliance.
• Ensure applications meet operational governance requirements (documentation, support contacts, runbooks, SLAs).
• Prepare and support internal/external audits related to operational processes, continuity, or system ownership.
• Implement automation and metrics to reduce manual validation processes.
  
  

• 5+ years of experience in Configuration Management and/or Continuity and Disaster Recovery.
• Experience with CMDB, application inventory management, or IT portfolio governance.
• Strong understanding of disaster recovery, IT service continuity (ITSCM), and service tiering.
• Proven experience defining and implementing data governance principles.
• Demonstrated ability to influence cross-functional teams and drive accountability through clear governance standards.
• Familiarity with ITIL processes including Change, Configuration, and Continuity Management.
• Knowledge of regulatory compliance programs (e.g., SOX) and related audit procedures.
• Excellent skills in documentation, audit readiness, and standards enforcement.
• ITIL Foundation certification preferred but not required.