The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) sets strict requirements for financial institutions providing services in EU, demanding robust cyber resilience, risk management, and third-party oversight to withstand operational disruptions. However, achieving and maintaining DORA compliance can be time-consuming, complex, and costly for financial organizations. Konfer’s Agentic AI platform is designed to help financial institutions navigate DORA compliance by offering various tools and resources. These include a DORA Compliance Controls Catalog, gap analysis reports, and ICT(Information and Communication Technology) risk management and third-party oversight. Common challenges include continuous risk management of the layered subcontracting chain and advanced resilience testing.
DORA compliance presents several key challenges for financial institutions, particularly in managing ICT risks, ensuring third-party compliance, and handling incident reporting and security testing.
DORA places a heavy emphasis on ICT risk management, requiring financial entities to assess, mitigate, and continuously monitor cyber threats. However, organizations often struggle with:
Many firms lack centralized frameworks for evaluating ICT risks across departments.
Identifying vulnerabilities before they escalate remains a challenge.
DORA requires proactive measures, but financial institutions often operate reactively
Many companies do not perform regular penetration tests or cyber resilience simulations, which leaves them vulnerable to unidentified risks.
Compliance teams often lack specialized personnel to implement and oversee comprehensive ICT risk strategies
DORA enforces strict oversight of third-party service providers, requiring financial institutions to ensure vendors meet operational resilience standards. The challenge lies in:
Many organizations work with multiple vendors (typically several thousand), making it difficult to track whether agreements align with DORA’s requirements.
Vendor risk assessments are often manual and take too long, resulting in outdated evaluations.
Financial institutions remain accountable for third-party failures, even if an external provider is responsible.
DORA compliance requires continuously maintaining, monitoring, and updating a registry of all ICT providers they engage with, at both sub-consolidated and consolidated levels (i.e., the subcontracting chain of ICT providers), throughout the lifecycle. Financial organizations must review and remediate existing contracts (typically several thousand) within the stipulated time, related to data protection, service level agreements, audit rights, and clearly defined exit strategies.
One of DORA’s strictest requirements involves incident reporting. Organizations must detect, log, and report cybersecurity events within specified timeframes. However, many firms struggle with:
The regulation mandates immediate response, but there is uncertainty about what qualifies as a “major ICT-related incident.”
Incident reports often lack standardized formatting, which makes it difficult for regulators to assess compliance.
Companies fail to contain threats efficiently without structured workflows.
DORA mandates regular security testing, which requires firms to run penetration tests, vulnerability assessments, and operational resilience simulations. However, challenges include:
Many organizations lack specialized security teams to conduct ongoing assessments.
Manual reviews often miss critical gaps in ICT controls.
Testing requirements expand as financial entities onboard new technologies or vendors.
Konfer Clear™ automates risk assessments by analyzing internal security policies, audit logs, and regulatory documents. It compares existing processes against DORA’s guidelines, identifies gaps, and delivers specific action points to improve compliance.
Konfer Clear™ reviews contracts, security policies, and service-level agreements (SLAs) to assess vendor compliance with DORA. It flags non-compliant clauses, which lowers the risk of regulatory penalties.
Konfer Clear™ helps compliance teams structure incident reports based on DORA’s reporting framework. It cross-references incident response logs with EU regulatory standards, ensuring all required information is captured and submitted on time.
Leveraging Konfer for DORA compliance offers several key business advantages for financial institutions:
Konfer provides a streamlined approach to DORA compliance:
Evidence can include policy and procedure documents, contracts, technical/physical safeguard reports, and relevant data.