There is less than 12 months left to comply with the Digital Operational Resilience Act
The regulatory clock is ticking for financial institutions across the European Union. By January 2025, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) will be in full force. This regulation aims to strengthen the financial sector's, and their information and communication technology (ICT) partners’, ability to withstand IT disruptions and cyber attacks, ensuring stability and consumer protection in the European Union by requiring firms to take a number of measures, including:
- Risk management
- Incident reporting
- Resilience and recovery testing
- ICT third-party risk management
- Information sharing
To be in full compliance you will need to understand how your organization will address each of the requirements. Do you take a best-of-breed approach for each application or try to find a single vendor that might provide a suboptimal solution?
One crucial aspect of DORA compliance where financial entities cannot afford to take a sub-optimal approach is the requirement for a robust resilience and recovery testing program. This requirement forces financial entities to test both their applications and third-party ICT vendors’ systems regularly to evaluate the strength of their protections and identify vulnerabilities. Financial entities must carry out these recovery and vulnerability tests at least once a year as well as threat-led penetration testing every three years. DORA regulators will require complete audit documentation of the tasks and results associated with each recovery plan. In addition, post-execution analysis and remediation plans for addressing any weaknesses they find will need to be reported to and validated by the relevant DORA authorities.
This is where Cutover’s automated runbooks come in as a game-changer.
How Cutover’s automated runbooks help you ensure compliance with the DORA law
Imagine experiencing a major IT outage or ransomware attack that cripples your systems. Now, picture being able to revert to a pre-incident state, minimizing downtime and data loss with programmatic ease, efficiency, and reduced risk. That's the power of automated runbooks.
Cutover’s automated runbooks contain a set of tasks and their dependencies that need to be undertaken to complete a technology operation. Those tasks can be manual activities carried out by an individual or team, or they can trigger automated activities like executing a script. In this way, runbooks bring together human expertise and knowledge and the benefits of automation.
Cutover’s automated runbooks provide a number of key capabilities and benefits to meet the DORA law testing requirements and more importantly, an actual recovery event, including:
- Automatic orchestration - orchestrate this complex sequence of tasks, ensuring that teams and technology follow the set path in the correct order by automatically notifying people of when to start their tasks and triggering automated processes.
- Enterprise visibility and reporting - view the progress and status of activities in real time to quickly identify potential problem areas and to give stakeholders and teams progress updates across the entire event.
- Integrations - increase flexibility and productivity and reduce the risk of human error with integrations across your tech stack. Cutover’s well-defined API allows you to create or query runbooks, tasks, or teams directly from third-party platforms.
- Regulatory audit logs - regulatory reporting is critical for DORA. Our automated runbooks automatically record the timing and execution of tasks for reporting and generating an audit trail that is not editable. This serves as a record of performance for auditing, continuous improvement, and regulatory compliance purposes. Audit logs can be used to investigate incidents and track compliance with regulations. This can help firms to demonstrate that they are taking steps to mitigate ICT risks.
- Post-execution analytics - get a clear picture of how your event has performed to evaluate whether objectives were met and how effectively a program was executed, and to identify future actions required to make improvements.
- Scalability - the number of tasks, users, dependencies, and runbooks being executed at the same time runs into the thousands to deliver DORA compliance. Cutover’s enterprise-grade capability has been proven in some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated organizations.
Preparing for the DORA law in 2025 and beyond:
With DORA's deadline looming, financial institutions cannot afford to delay their resilience efforts. Cutover’s automated runbooks offer a powerful and efficient solution to meet the regulation's demands and strengthen their overall resilience and application recovery.
By embracing Cutover’s automated runbooks, financial institutions can ensure compliance with DORA and build a more secure and resilient foundation for the future. In a world of ever-increasing cyber threats, the ability to bounce back quickly is no longer a luxury – it's a necessity.
Start preparing today and let Cutover's automated runbooks help you face the DORA deadline with confidence.
Why choose Cutover to ensure Digital Operational Resilience Act compliance?
There are a number of reasons why you should choose Cutover to help you comply with DORA:
- We are experts in cyber and IT disaster recovery. We have a deep understanding of the challenges that financial institutions face and how to overcome them.
- Our platform is proven. Our solutions are used by some of the largest financial institutions in the world.
- We are committed to your success. We will work with you every step of the way to ensure that you are compliant with DORA.
Contact Cutover today to learn more about how we can help you comply with DORA.