Disaster Recovery Infrastructure Project Manager Simulation — JPMorgan Chase

The scenario

JPMorgan Chase & Co. — $180B+ in annual revenue, 310,000+ employees, the largest bank in the United States by assets ($3.9 trillion) — has been issued a Matter Requiring Attention (MRA) by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency following the catastrophic DR failure at Pacific Western Bank, where a ransomware attack exposed that the bank's disaster recovery infrastructure could not restore critical systems within regulatory expectations. The OCC's subsequent horizontal review of systemically important financial institutions found that JPMorgan's disaster recovery capabilities, while historically adequate, no longer meet heightened supervisory expectations for automated failover, geographic diversity, and documented recovery testing. JPMorgan's current DR infrastructure was architected 8 years ago: two physical data centers in a hot/warm configuration (primary in Columbus, OH; secondary in Plano, TX), tape-based backup for Tier 2 and Tier 3 systems, manual failover runbooks maintained by a small DR engineering team, and recovery time objectives ranging from 4-8 hours for Tier 1 systems to 24-48 hours for Tier 2. The OCC MRA specifically cites: (1) RTOs exceeding supervisory expectations for systemically important operations, (2) absence of automated failover capabilities, (3) insufficient geographic diversity for cloud-era resilience, (4) DR test results not independently validated or audit-documented, and (5) no evidence of annual full-scope DR exercises for critical payment and trading systems. The remediation project has been funded at $14M — carved from the Technology Resilience budget, which means other infrastructure initiatives have been deferred or cancelled. The Markets Technology team, whose $6M network refresh was cancelled to fund this project, is actively uncooperative. The DR Engineering team has been warning about these gaps for two years but was deprioritized in favor of revenue-generating technology projects. The OCC has set a hard remediation deadline and expects documented evidence of compliance — not a plan, but demonstrated capability.

What you'll do as the project manager

• →Implement automated failover for all Tier 1 systems (core banking, payments, trading) achieving sub-60-minute RTO — down from the current 4-8 hour manual process
• →Deploy Zerto continuous replication across 340+ production servers to the AWS us-west-2 DR region, achieving RPO of less than 15 seconds
• →Modernize Tier 2 system recovery (risk systems, regulatory reporting, HR) from tape-based backup to near-real-time replication with sub-4-hour RTO
• →Conduct and document two full-scope DR exercises with independent validation — producing audit-ready evidence for OCC examination
• →Establish automated DR testing framework with monthly validation runs and dashboard reporting for ongoing compliance

Project management skills you'll build

The challenges you'll navigate

• •OCC remediation deadline is fixed — any significant delay triggers escalation to enforcement level with potential consent order implications
• •Markets Technology team is actively uncooperative — Deepa Krishnamurthy's $6M network refresh was cancelled to fund this project and she has not committed resources for DR testing
• •Zerto has never been deployed at JPMorgan's scale with this application complexity — Oracle RAC, IBM MQ, and custom trading platforms are not standard Zerto use cases
• •Mainframe GDPS configuration is maintained by a 3-person team with no documentation — if any of them leave, institutional knowledge is lost
• •CyberSec has not approved Zerto agent deployment on production servers — security review could add 4-6 weeks to the timeline
• •No full-scope DR exercise has been conducted in 3 years — the last test was a partial, scripted failover of non-critical systems

Technology & stakeholders

You'll manage 6 stakeholders, including Pat Carey (Managing Director, Head of Global Technology Resilience), Vanessa Chiu (Executive Director, Technology Program Management Office), Marcus Webb (Vice President, Disaster Recovery Engineering), and more.

What you'll walk away with

A verified, shareable record of a completed enterprise project — plus the PMO deliverables you produced along the way (charter, project plan, SteerCo deck, closure document). It's real, demonstrable project management experience you can put on your resume and speak to in interviews.

Frequently asked questions

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