DORA Regulation
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is an EU regulation focused on strengthening the digital resilience of financial services. It establishes strict cybersecurity, risk management, and incident reporting requirements for banks, insurers, and ICT providers.
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What is DORA?
Adopted in 2022 and enforceable from January 2025, DORA is part of the EU Digital Finance Package. Its goal is to ensure that financial services can withstand, respond to, and recover from ICT-related disruptions, whether caused by cyberattacks, system failures, or third-party service outages.
Unlike previous fragmented guidelines, DORA creates a single regulatory framework for operational resilience across the EU’s financial sector, harmonizing requirements for both institutions and their technology providers.
Scope and applicability
DORA applies broadly across the financial ecosystem, including:
- Banks, investment firms, and payment institutions.
- Insurance and reinsurance companies.
- Central counterparties, trading venues, and credit rating agencies.
- ICT service providers considered critical to financial institutions, including cloud and managed security providers.
This wide net ensures that both financial institutions and the vendors they rely on are held accountable for resilience.
Key requirements
- ICT risk management: firms must maintain comprehensive frameworks covering prevention, detection, containment, recovery, and repair of ICT-related incidents.
- Incident reporting: significant incidents must be reported within strict timelines, using standardized templates to ensure EU-wide consistency.
- Testing: regular resilience testing is mandated, including advanced threat-led penetration testing (TLPT) for critical entities.
- Third-party risk: financial institutions must monitor ICT providers, with oversight powers extending to regulators.
- Information sharing: trusted mechanisms are encouraged for sharing cyber threat intelligence among financial entities.
- Enforcement and penalties: supervisory authorities can impose financial penalties, restrict operations, or even suspend the use of non-compliant ICT providers.
Impact on SecOps
DORA raises the expectations for security operations in financial services:
- Stricter incident response: SOCs must adapt to standardized reporting deadlines, ensuring fast escalation and coordination with regulators.
- Threat-led testing: SecOps will face more red-team style testing, requiring continuous preparedness against advanced threats.
- Third-party oversight: SecOps must integrate vendor monitoring into their workflows, extending security visibility into supply chains.
- Cross-border consistency: operations across EU countries must align under a single framework, reducing gaps but increasing compliance workload.
For SecOps, DORA is not just compliance — it forces operational resilience to become a measurable, auditable function.
Further reading
- European Commission: DORA overview. Read more
- ENISA: DORA and ICT resilience. Read more
- European Central Bank: DORA impact. Read more
- Deloitte: Preparing for DORA. Read more
- PwC: DORA compliance insights. Read more