Experiencing a Breach?
GET IN TOUCH

DORA Compliance 

Achieve operational resilience with cybersecurity best practices recommended in DORA compliance with end-to-end support for cybersecurity and compliance management.  

SPEAK WITH AN EXPERT
OVERVIEW

Understanding
DORA Compliance

The European Union passed the Digital Operational Resilience Act on 27 December 2022 to augment the cyber resilience of financial entities in Europe. It covers all the aspects of operational resilience that financial entities failed to address in the past. It ensures the security and reliability of operations. DORA provides a detailed framework with all the hygiene measures to manage risks associated with operations including cyber threats and system failures. It is a one-of-a-kind framework that has assigned power to supervisors in financial services to periodically conduct risk assessment on Critical ICT 3rd Party Providers (CTPPs) such as Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). Discover how SharkStriker helps financial entities become DORA compliant.

DORA Compliance Understanding
APPLICABILITY

On whom does the DORA apply? 

  • Banks
  • Credit Institutions 
  • Non-traditional entities 
  • 3rd party service providers that supply financial firms with ICT systems and services like data centre and cloud services 
  • Firms that cover critical third-party information services such as credit rating services and data analytics providers 
  • Investment firms 
  • Crypto asset service providers 
  • Crowdfunding platforms 
  • Entities excluded from financial regulations 
BENEFITS

Benefits of being GDPR compliant

  • Assists entities in risk classification across posture
  • Improves digital operational resilience reducing downtime significantly
  • Encourages entities to share information regarding threats
  •  Saves entities from the cost of cyber attacks
  • Minimizes the probability of operational disruption due to threats
  • Prepares organizations against data breaches and ransomware attacks
  • Helps manage ICT third party risks
  • Enhances the brand reputation through improved data security
NON-COMPLIANCE RISKS

What are the consequences of DORA non-compliance?

Entities that are subjected to DORA must show adherence to all the guidelines by January 2025 on the assessment by “competent authorities” designated as regulators for each EU member state. They have the power to issue remediation measures where needed and penalize non-compliance upon assessment. All the critical ICT providers are to be governed by Lead Overseers assigned by the European Commission. They can penalize entities for noncompliance with fines of up to 1% of daily global turnover for every day, up to 6 months until found compliant.

APPROACH

Here is how we can help financial entities become DORA compliant

01
Risk and gap assessment
We help categorize and prioritize risks based on comprehensive risk assessment of the infrastructure and gap assessment of status quo measures, looking for missing policies, procedures, protocols, and tools for ICT risk management and third-party risk management.
02
Development of policies, procedures, protocols & tools
Based on the risk and gap assessment, we develop strategies to address the gaps identified and help develop missing policies, procedures, protocols, and deployment of tools as per DORA requirements.
03
Re-align incident response
We assist in establishing a mechanism to support ICT-related incident management processes, including promptly detecting, analyzing, responding, documenting, and reporting ICT-related incidents to the competent authorities.
04
Prepare third party/vendors
We identify requirements to maintain operational and cybersecurity resilience of third-party/vendor as per DORA requirements, preparing them to identify risks across their infrastructure and respond to incidents.
05
Compliance monitoring
We help establish a comprehensive mechanism for detecting and addressing compliance deviations through regular assessments and easily accessible cybersecurity and compliance expertise.
REQUIREMENTS

What does it cover?

DORA has specified that the management body of all the subjected entities will be accountable for the governance of ICT. They will be defining risk management strategies and long-term risk management frameworks that are made to address the latest developments in the threat landscape. Entities are needed to periodically conduct risk assessments of their posture and conduct business impact analysis of cyber-attacks. Additionally, they are required to prepare long-term plans for business continuity and recovery.

Entities must establish a comprehensive system for monitoring, categorizing, recording, and reporting all ICT-specific incidents. They must prepare a detailed report based on the root cause analysis with all the necessary incident-specific evidence, document it thoroughly, and report it to the relevant parties. They must adopt an efficient system for incident response management.

All the entities that are subjected to the DORA compliance are required to periodically evaluate the defense posture of their ICT systems, identifying, and addressing all the vulnerabilities. They must prepare a detailed report with all the vulnerabilities identified and classified as per their severity. They are required to conduct scenario-based testing and threat-led pen-testing at least once a year.

Entities must take measures to manage the risks of all the third parties that are associated with them through contractual agreements and regular security posture assessment. They must identify all the dependencies associated with the third parties and must take measures to ensure that there is no increased reliance on a single third-party provider. They must periodically assess all the third-party agreements and ensure that they are up to the latest DORA requirements.

As per DORA, entities are required to share all the incident-specific information including security vulnerabilities, tactics, techniques, and procedures that are being deployed by all the modern-day threat actors.

BEST PRACTICES

DORA best practices we help implement

  • Developing, documenting, and implementing policies, procedures, and tools for:
    • vulnerability and patch management
    • safeguards to preserve the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of data
    • governing, acquisition, and maintenance of ICT systems
    • identifying and implementing security measures to prevent data loss and leakage from systems
    • identification of secure configuration baseline for ICT assets to minimize exposure to threats
    • security measures against cyber threats ICT systems and endpoints may be exposed to
    • access restriction, including physical access controls based on need-to-know, need-to-use, and least privilege basis
    • logging to safeguard against intrusion and data misuse
  • Establishing qualitative and quantitative indicators for measuring the impact and likelihood of vulnerabilities and threats.
  • Planning and developing a simplified risk management framework for:
    • determining risk tolerance levels for ICT risk as per the risk appetite of the entity
    • assessing ICT risks
    • establishing mitigation strategies for all the risks.
  • Establishing missing mechanisms for data security logging and network security management, including:
    • processes for secure data deletion premises or externally stored that is no longer needed by the entity
    • measures to prevent and detect unauthorized connections to the network and secure the network traffic between the financial entity’s internal network and the internal and external connection
    • encryption measures of network connections passing over public, domestic, third-party, private, and wireless networks for communication
    • procedures to terminate, lock, and limit system and remote sessions.
  • Evaluation of network design against ICT requirements.
  • Identifying and implementing of requirements to maintain digital operational resilience for third parties and vendors per the DORA requirements.
  • Establish mechanisms for threat intelligence and other information sharing.

Get security and compliance experts to meet your DORA compliance goals

SPEAK WITH OUR TEAM