How to Get Your Organisation DORA Compliant Webinar

DORA is designed to ensure financial organisations can maintain operations during disruption, not just prevent incidents. Its five pillars, risk management, incident handling, resilience testing, third-party risk, and intelligence sharing, force organisations to prove they can operate under pressure. Compliance only matters if it translates into real operational resilience across both technical systems and organisational processes.

The biggest challenges are not technical controls but accountability and supplier complexity. Organisations often struggle to define who owns DORA internally, while third-party ecosystems introduce risk that is difficult to assess, control, and contractually enforce. Progress requires clear internal ownership per pillar and a structured approach to classifying, assessing, and governing suppliers based on criticality.

DORA shifts responsibility to senior leadership, requiring boards to define ICT risk strategy, understand cyber exposure, and actively participate in oversight. Without executive understanding and buy-in, funding, prioritisation, and governance decisions stall. Successful organisations invest in leadership education so cyber risk can be discussed and managed as a business issue, not just a technical one.

Organisations must be able to detect, classify, and report incidents quickly, even when information is incomplete or evolving. This requires alignment between SOC operations, incident response processes, and regulatory reporting requirements. The focus is on building workflows that can produce accurate, consistent outputs under pressure, not relying on ad hoc decision-making during a crisis.

Having backups and recovery plans is meaningless if they are not regularly tested under realistic conditions. DORA expects organisations to prove they can restore operations quickly, including in scenarios involving third parties and complex dependencies. Effective resilience requires continuous testing, clear accountability, and the ability to adapt as systems, suppliers, and threats evolve.