As a cybersecurity company, Obrela is vigilant in monitoring the evolving regulations and how these impact our clients, especially those in the financial sector. With the introduction of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), we see a transformative step forward in the European Union's approach to financial cyber resilience. Here’s an overview of what DORA entails and what it means for financial entities.
DORA is an updated, comprehensive regulatory framework designed to strengthen the cybersecurity and resilience of the financial sector across the EU. Recognizing the critical role of ICT in financial services, DORA consolidates existing regulations and introduces new requirements under a unified legislative umbrella. This act covers all financial players, not just banks, ensuring a broad and inclusive approach to digital operational resilience.
The primary goal of DORA is to enhance the robustness of financial entities to withstand ICT-related disruptions and threats. By harmonizing fragmented regulations into a single framework, DORA simplifies the compliance landscape, making it clearer for entities to understand and meet regulatory mandates. This includes management of ICT risks, oversight of third-party service providers, and ensuring effective incident reporting and response strategies.
Under DORA, financial institutions are expected to adopt a proactive approach to cyber resilience, focusing on comprehensive cyber risk management. This means executive boards are now directly responsible for their cybersecurity strategies — ensuring they understand and manage risks appropriately. Institutions must identify critical assets and implement protective measures, detect threats, and have robust response and recovery strategies in place.
DORA is not merely about compliance; it's about cultivating a forward-looking, learning-driven approach to cyber resilience. Financial entities must continuously evaluate and improve their cybersecurity and resilience practices in response to evolving threats. Those found non-compliant must not only address deficiencies but also demonstrate ongoing improvements in their cybersecurity posture.
Obrela offers assistance in meeting organizational compliance needs and achieving your desired resilience posture, through our MRC product portfolio, which can help you prepare and plan for the new regime.
The official rollout of DORA is set for January 2025, following its introduction in January 2023. This two-year gap allows for the development of detailed regulatory technical standards and provides the financial sector with adequate time to align their systems and practices with the new requirements. It ensures that all involved parties, regulators and financial entities are prepared for a smooth transition.
While DORA aims to standardize cyber resilience practices across the EU, it may lead to differences with regulations in non-EU countries, such as the UK. Financial entities operating in multiple jurisdictions may need to navigate these differences to ensure global compliance.
As domain experts, we're here to help our clients navigate these changes. Whether it’s understanding DORA’s implications, carrying out a DORA readiness and maturity assessment, developing and executing a DORA compliance roadmap, our team is equipped to support you every step of the way.
To ensure compliance with DORA, financial institutions across the European Union need to undertake specific actions. Here’s a non-exhaustive checklist to guide you through the necessary steps:
By following this checklist, financial institutions can position themselves to comply with DORA and enhance their overall digital operational resilience. This proactive approach will be crucial in navigating the complexities of modern cybersecurity threats and ensuring financial stability across the European Union.
Obrela’s Managed Risk and Controls (MRC) platform comprehensively covers customers needs throughout their journey to comply with the DORA requirements. MRC along with our elite team of experts can support and guide Organisations in the Financial Services sector from understanding the scope of DORA, through evaluation of their security framework to testing and audit. Users benefit from real-time centralized view of DORA compliance posture and enhanced compliance insights that fuel better decision-making and results, improve visibility in the performance of the DORA compliance program and gain full control, tracking and in-depth access in the execution of their improvements or mitigation plan.
In addition, by deploying Obrela's MRC platform you can gain: