Colleen Van Camp
Prior to Colleen's appointment as the Syracuse University ITS Disaster Recovery Manager, Colleen was a Business Continuity Planner for Excellus Health Plan. Her responsibility included two primary data centers and several small data centers spread across Upstate New York. While her primary focus was on the Health Plan IT systems, she also worked with the subsidiary companies to ensure their disaster recovery plans not only met their disaster recovery needs but also were in compliance with regulatory requirements.
As the Business Continuity Planner, Colleen was responsible for all aspects of the IT DR program. This included managing the DR budget and creating a strategic DR Program. She partnered with each area of IT to develop DR plans and procedures and facilitated the bi-annual offsite recovery tests. Throughout her nine year DR test planning experience she managed the transition of a primarily mainframe focused recovery to a distributed environment recovery. She was responsible for managing, coordinating and working with over 80 test participants during each recovery test. Colleen firmly believes that while planning is critical to any DR program, it is the technical staff and their skills that will make the endeavor successful.
While at Excellus, she was a member of the Incident Management Team to ensure business continuity. This team was invoked during snow emergencies, power outages and telecommunication outages.
Colleen is currently a member of the Eastern Great Lakes Association of Contingency Planners (EGLACP) and is active on their Public Relations Board. The EGLACP elected Colleen Vice President in 2010. EGLACP is a business continuity and DR planning forum which strives to share, explore, improve, and develop disaster recovery and business continuity strategies and methodologies for the advancement of business continuity management in business and corporate industries.
Prior to entering into the DR Field, Colleen worked in various IT disciplines including operations analysis, production scheduling, mainframe storage management, and computer operations for Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, Keane Consultants, GTE, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Colleen has successfully managed a variety of efforts throughout her career. While at GTE she was the project team leader for the STROBE software justification and implementation effort. Colleen also played an instrumental role in two successful data center consolidations; Atlanta to Camillus and Camillus to Tampa. During these migrations her primary role was to work with all IT areas to learn and document the processes and tasks. While at Excellus, she lead a risk assessment process that required Excellus to develop an Initial Response Procedure Manual, complete a gap analysis of disaster recovery requirements, and develop necessary DR documentation.
Colleen's primary focus at SU is working with ITS technology groups to develop, maintain and test an enterprise ITS systems and applications disaster recovery plan. She is also managing the migration of ITS systems and applications from Machinery Hall to the newly built Green Data Center. Colleen is pursuing a bachelor's degree in the School of Information Studies.