DORA compliance: what you should know

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is European regulation. With increasing reliance on digital systems and IT service providers, the risk of disruptions and cyber attacks is also growing. "DORA ensures that organisations are better prepared for digital threats, can detect incidents faster and ensure continuity of services."

The legislation applies to a wide range of financial institutions, including banks, insurers, investment institutions, payment service providers, pension funds and IT service providers that provide critical services to these institutions.

DORA has clear requirements in several areas of digital resilience. First, there is ICT risk management. Organisations are required to draw up a detailed ICT risk management programme. In this programme, risk assessments should be carried out, continuity plans drawn up and maintained, and crisis management procedures laid down. "Specifically, this means that organisations must always know what risks their systems face and how to recover quickly in the event of a disruption," Dirk Jan said.

In addition, DORA mandates careful ICT incident management. According to DORA, incidents that have an impact on services must be reported immediately to the competent regulators, such as De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB). Customers should also be informed in a timely manner about incidents that may affect them. "A structured incident response process is therefore essential,’ he stresses. Another important aspect is testing digital resilience. Organisations should periodically test their digital resilience through vulnerability scans, penetration tests, physical security tests and simulations of crisis and recovery processes. ‘These tests ensure that vulnerabilities are exposed in a timely manner and that employees are prepared for potential threats."

Third-party management also plays a central role within DORA. "Since many financial institutions work with external suppliers, organisations need to map their suppliers and sub-suppliers, standardise and draft contracts in line with DORA and document agreements on security, availability and recovery." Finally, DORA encourages information sharing between financial institutions. "By sharing cyber threat information among themselves, sector-wide threats can be addressed more effectively and fought together."

Although DORA compliance initially feels like a legal obligation, compliance offers significant benefits beyond mere regulatory compliance. For instance, the stricter regulations provide improved transparency. "By imposing stricter risk management requirements on IT partners, the entire IT supply chain becomes more transparent. This allows organisations to make more informed choices when selecting and evaluating suppliers."

Moreover, DORA offers opportunities for automating processes. "The clear framework for documentation and data collection makes it possible to largely automate inventories, make delivery processes for audits more efficient and reduce manual administrative burdens," states Dirk Jan. Security within the organisation is also better monitored. By standardising ICT agreements and maintaining an up-to-date register of suppliers, there is early detection of disruptions. As a result, potential problems can be addressed faster. The obligation to report incidents also ensures a strengthened supply chain. "Thanks to this obligation to report, better insight into the chain is created, allowing organisations to intervene more quickly in disruptions and seek cooperation with suppliers in incident recovery."

In addition, DORA compliance leads to improved compliance and administration. "Written-out continuity plans, test programmes and standardised documentation not only improve compliance, but also ensure more professional management and efficient administration," confirms Dirk Jan.

For organisations that already have Vendor Management and Contract Management in place, ISPnext offers a targeted solution to make DORA compliance clear and manageable. "This functionality, optionally addable to the platform, supports the recording, structuring and reporting of all relevant DORA data. Think legal entities, supplier information and contractual agreements. All according to the standard formats required by regulators," says Dirk Jan.

This makes the DORA reporting process much simpler. All existing data is automatically ordered, managed and supplemented with templates that comply with European directives. "When the time comes to submit data, you generate a complete DORA report with one click. This saves you time, reduces risks and prevents stress during audits and inspections." With ISPnext, you have a powerful tool that supports every step of the DORA obligation.

To achieve DORA compliance in a structured and efficient way, we recommend going through four steps. First, there is the inventory and risk assessment, mapping all existing suppliers, contracts and IT processes. Next, the risks of different suppliers are analysed and the critical services they provide are determined. This is followed by the implementation of risk management and processes. This involves drawing up clear policy documents and processes for incident reporting, continuity management, crisis communication and supplier management.

The third step focuses on digitisation and automation. "By using smart software solutions, organisations can centralise contract management, keep supplier information up to date and generate reports automatically." Finally, in the fourth step, resilience tests and audits are performed, employees are trained in crisis scenarios and processes are optimised based on the outcomes.