Maintaining high operational resilience and compliance with DORA
As EU financial services organisations navigate the complexities of digital operations, compliance with regulations such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is essential. Financial services organisations have until Jan. 17, 2025, to implement DORA requirements or face sanctions.
The Regulation is designed to ensure the information, communications and technology (ICT) used by financial institutions can withstand, respond to, and recover from security-related disruptions to protect their business, customers, and the market.
The regulatory requirements structured in the form of five pillars cover topics such as centralised ICT Risk frameworks, real-time incident reporting, third-party supplier risk management, regular resilience and threat lead pen testing, and information sharing amongst financial service organisations.
Whilst it may seem like another administrative challenge in an already heavily regulated financial services industry, DORA presents a valuable opportunity for forward-thinking organisations, including large technology providers.
Even organisations not in-scope for DORA can benefit by viewing DORA compliance as a framework for improved enterprise resiliency.
Compliance management for operational excellence
Validating and sharing compliance details in line with internal rules or external regulations can be a burdensome activity. ServiceNow Operational Resilience Management enables organisations to automate compliance reporting accurately and within prescribed timelines.
Streamlined reporting and auditing can lead to increased operational efficiency and enhanced reliability. These benefits can ultimately result in significant competitive advantages by reducing costs related to ICT incidents and improving overall risk posture.
This helps reduce the compliance burden on teams, freeing them to focus on strategic initiatives and improving overall service quality. Service-level objectives (SLOs) and automated responses can help build a culture of reliability, benefiting customers and stakeholders.
The role of technology in supporting compliance
DORA requires measurable compliance with operational resilience standards for financial entities. Many financial services firms track critical services by tagging regulatory frameworks in service maps. This doesn’t always provide visibility into how the services are interacting with the underlying infrastructure, however.
That means there’s limited consolidated information about service ownership, dependencies, regulatory sensitivities, and risk posture. The ServiceNow platform can help solve this problem.
In addition to the capabilities available in Operational Resilience Management, ServiceNow Service Reliability Management can help organisations conduct digital operational resilience testing and ICT-related incident reporting. The product features SLOs, alert response automation, and on-call incident response.
Service Reliability Management enables organisations to:
- Define and monitor SLOs by configuring specific metrics related to uptime, performance, and incident resolution
- Track compliance with DORA regulation with real-time monitoring, identifying when SLOs fall short and allowing prompt corrective actions
With greater control over their digital services, organisations can move accountability for the availability of their digital footprints closer to the teams that own the services. This introduces a new layer of knowledge about application interactions, behaviors, and patterns.
Fully realising the benefits of this opportunity requires a technology strategy woven into an organisation's fabric.
By putting Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and service mapping in place, organisations can add PCI, SOX, and DORA compliance tags to services. Adhering to SLOs can help organisations demonstrate commitment to service reliability and gain the visibility required for audits, security, and risk purposes to maintain compliance.
DORA stresses effective on-call incident management. ServiceNow can help organisations:
- Streamline on-call scheduling by automatically assigning the right teams to respond to incidents, with escalation policies in place for 24/7 compliance
- Automate alert response to suppress, enrich, group, and escalate alerts to incidents automatically, helping teams respond to the most critical alerts
- Create incidents based on alerting to inform development teams when error budgets are at risk of being breached
A well-structured on-call management system can improve incident response times and align with DORA’s expectations for operational resilience.
Find out more about how ServiceNow helps organisations achieve and maintain operational resilience and regulatory compliance.