DORA Compliance: A Practical Guide to Operational Resilience

TL;DR

1. DORA compliance applies to almost every EU-facing financial entity and its tech suppliers; the enforcement clock stops on 17 January 2025.
2. Five pillars (risk, incident reporting, resilience testing, third-party risk, information-sharing) drive most of the new obligations.
3. Penalties can reach 1 % of daily global turnover per day, plus reputational damage.
4. A 10-step checklist (risk mapping → real-time monitoring → third-party oversight) covers 90 % of auditor questions.
5. Strac’s SaaS or self-hosted DSPM + DLP scans, classifies and auto-remediates sensitive data across SaaS and Cloud, giving security teams a launch-ready control to demonstrate DORA compliance in weeks, not months.

✨ What is DORA Compliance and Why Does It Matter?

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is EU Regulation 2022/2554 designed to ensure that financial organisations (and the ICT providers that serve them) can withstand, respond to and recover from digital disruptions. It harmonises rules that were previously scattered across EBA/EIOPA/ESMA guidance, creating a single playbook for risk management, incident reporting, testing and third-party oversight.

Why you should care now: the final go-live date is 17 January 2025; boards must certify readiness and regulators will publish penalties publicly.

✨ Who Must Meet DORA Compliance Requirements?

DORA’s scope is intentionally broad:

• Financial entities — banks, credit & payment institutions, insurers, reinsurers, investment firms, crypto-asset service providers.
• Financial-market infrastructure — CCPs, CSDs, trading venues, benchmark administrators.
• ICT third-party service providers whose services are “critical or important” to any financial entity.
• Non-EU firms offering these services inside the EU.

✨ Key Pillars of DORA Compliance

1. ICT Risk Management – documented, board-approved framework spanning asset inventories, controls and continuous improvement.
2. Incident Reporting – detect, classify and notify major incidents to authorities within tight timelines.
3. Digital Operational Resilience Testing – from vulnerability scans to full threat-led penetration tests (TLPT) for high-impact firms.
4. ICT Third-Party Risk – contractual clauses (Art. 30), layered oversight, exit strategies.
5. Information & Intelligence Sharing – secure, sector-wide exchange of threat intel.

Roadmap & Deadlines for DORA Compliance

• 16 January 2023 – Regulation enters into force.
• 17 January 2024 – ESAs publish final technical standards.
• 17 January 2025 – Full compliance mandatory.

Tip: auditors will ask for evidence of progress (gap analysis, project plans) well before the 2025 deadline.

Penalties for DORA Compliance Failures

Regulators may levy administrative fines up to 1 % of daily global turnover—accruing daily until compliance is restored. Criminal sanctions are possible for egregious cases, and all penalties become public record.

DORA Compliance Checklist: 10 Practical Steps

1. Map all ICT assets & data flows.
2. Classify data and identify critical business services.
3. Implement continuous monitoring & real-time alerting.
4. Establish incident-classification thresholds and playbooks.
5. Run resilience tests (incl. TLPT if in-scope).
6. Inventory third-party providers; add DORA clauses to contracts.
7. Formalise backup, recovery & crisis-communications plans.
8. Train staff on new processes; run tabletop exercises.
9. Document everything; retain logs & evidence.
10. Review, update, and report progress to the board quarterly.

How Strac Accelerates DORA Compliance

• Unified DSPM + DLP across SaaS (Slack, O365, Salesforce), Cloud (AWS S3, RDS) – discover, classify and auto-remediate sensitive data in minutes.
• Real-time incident enrichment & noise reduction – Strac’s AI agent slashes false positives from Microsoft Purview or Netskope, satisfying the “prompt incident reporting” requirement.
• Self-hosted or SaaS – deploy in your own VPC when data-sovereignty is critical, or choose Strac Cloud for fastest time-to-value.
• Out-of-the-box DORA dashboards – map Strac controls to the five pillars and generate board-ready reports instantly.

Explore the full connector list on the Strac integrations page or request a 14-day DORA readiness pilot.

Spicy FAQs on DORA Compliance

What makes DORA compliance tougher than GDPR or NIS2 compliance?

DORA focuses on operational continuity, not just data protection: you must prove your systems can keep running during an attack and that third-party outages won’t take you down.

Do non-EU fintechs serving EU customers need DORA compliance?

Yes. If you provide services to EU financial entities or EU consumers, regulators treat you as in-scope, even if your headquarters is elsewhere.

How does Strac slash incident-reporting time below DORA’s thresholds?

Strac’s real-time monitors tag sensitive data the moment it’s created or moved, then auto-remediates or flags only material events—cutting alert fatigue and making 72-hour reporting windows easy to hit.

Is there a quick win to show auditors before the 2025 deadline?

Yes — run Strac’s DORA Fast-Start Scan on your top SaaS apps. In less than a day, you’ll have: data maps, policy findings, remediation actions, and a gap-analysis report you can hand to auditors.

Need hands-on help? Book a DORA compliance workshop via the Strac integrations page and get a customised action plan in 48 hours.