Financial services: meeting DORA requirements in practice

The five pillars of DORA

• ICT risk management: identify and protect ICT assets, detect incidents, respond and recover.
• ICT incident management and reporting: classify incidents and report major ones to the supervisory authority.
• Digital operational resilience testing: regular testing and, for selected firms, threat-led penetration testing (TLPT).
• ICT third-party risk: manage service providers and maintain a register of information.
• Information sharing on cyber threats.

Know and assess your ICT assets

DORA requires all ICT assets and their dependencies to be identified and classified – continuously, not once a year. XMfortress Surface keeps the inventory up to date; Exposure shows the paths through which critical functions could be reached.

Test and prove resilience

XMfortress Validate checks regularly and in a controlled way whether security controls detect and stop real attack techniques. It does not replace mandatory TLPT, but it provides ongoing evidence between the required tests (see penetration testing vs. validation).

Detect and report incidents

Classifying major ICT incidents and reporting them on time requires a clean timeline: What happened when, which systems were affected, what action was taken? XMfortress Detect reconstructs this chain and exports it for reporting.

XMfortress supports the technical implementation and provides evidence. Responsibility for DORA compliance remains with the financial entity.