January marked the 1-year countdown to when regulators will begin enforcing DORA (Digital Operational Resiliency Act) after a two-year implementation period. 

The regulation affects financial entities and ICT service providers operating within the EU, in addition to supporting infrastructure services situated outside the EU. 

The intention behind DORA is to positively support digital transformation and innovation in the financial sector whilst crucially preserving market stability and integrity. For an individual organisation, this means enabling you to be digitally competitive whilst protecting your organisation with a strong and secure technology foundation.

The benefits of meeting DORA standards are clear:

• Enhanced protection and stability for your organisation to continue doing business

• Improved recovery and operational resilience following disruption

Being non-compliant with DORA can result in:

• Your business being at increased risk of operational disruption

• Operational disruptions being far more severe

• Client and reputational impact

• Regulatory penalties 

DORA consolidates the requirements from a number of different regulations and standardises them along five key areas of practice:

  1. Operational risk management – establishment of business continuity and disaster recovery frameworks
  2. Incident reporting – standardisation of identification, classification, reporting and analysis
  3. Digital operational resiliency testing – establishment of testing capabilities and remediation measures
  4. ICT third party risk – improvement of assessment and mitigation of material third party risk
  5. Information sharing – establishment of information sharing channels for threat intelligence

Depending on your starting point, uplifting all of these areas can involve material changes to the way your organisation manages technology, controls and reports on risk, including the way your teams are structured. 

Elixirr’s tried-and-tested approach to DORA readiness cuts through the noise and helps you focus on your most critical control gaps.

Our standardised DORA Controls Framework and methodology for identifying critical or important functions (CIFs) distils the regulation down to a consolidated list of tangible actions, accelerating the mapping of your organisation’s controls to the regulation and enabling a rapid gap analysis to identify any remediation activities.

We build and deliver you a readiness roadmap that prioritises the resilience of your critical and important functions and focuses on practical regulatory compliance that also delivers operational business benefits. We prioritise critical aspects of the regulation to achieve this in the most cost effective and time efficient way.

Contact us if you’d like to discuss your business’s approach to DORA so that you’re ready for the January 2025 deadline.

Connect with our experts