Let me start by saying, I don?t think so. With the recent events in the past few years, September 11, 2004 powerful hurricane season, virus threats, blackouts you name it has happened not counting the compliance of government regulatory requirements. Because of this healthcare IT professional have become more aware of the need to have effective disaster recovery strategies. As the need to have a Disaster Recovery Plan in effect raises so is the marketing of disaster recovery plan development tools.
Please don?t get me wrong I do think that disaster recovery plan development tools are useful, but that is what they are tools and that how they should be approach and used. They can provide a guide to developing a plan and also provide an organized way to document and to enter content, but in the same manner anybody who buys one of these tools thinking they can just fill in the blanks, well they can be a subject for rude awakenings. If all is needed is a document to satisfy a request for a DR plan then maybe a DRP tool is the solution but think about the consequences if the plan needs to be executed.
It takes a great deal of human effort, resource coordination and expertise to develop an effective disaster recovery plan. During the plan development stages resources that comprise team members must be identified a workflow for plan testing and execution must be developed and this can also involve outside entities the need to be identified and recruited. DR planning tools do not provide the kind of information that is discovered during the assessment process and is specific to the organization it is being developed for. Before you start using these tools you must first assess the impact of a disruption of services. An accurate assessment on the impact of lost services, application, systems etc. will provide the foundation for an effective disaster recovery plan. Planning tools are great for assisting in the organization of these events some tools even provide sequential task that can be used in the creation of a DRP development workplan.
My point is that DRP tools are there to use during the development of a Disaster Recovery Plan, they are not indented as a Disaster Recovery Plan solution so I hope. As I mentioned before it takes human effort and expertise to plan for disaster recovery especially in the healthcare industry.
