DORA Compliance

Why DORA changes everything

DORA represents a fundamental shift in how financial regulators approach operational resilience. Rather than sector-specific guidelines, it establishes a comprehensive framework covering ICT risk management, incident reporting, digital operational resilience testing, ICT third-party risk management, and information sharing. The regulation applies to virtually all financial entities — from banks and insurers to payment institutions and crypto-asset providers.

The UK's Operational Resilience framework, enforced by the PRA and FCA, mirrors many of DORA's requirements while adding UK-specific expectations around important business services and impact tolerances. For organisations operating across both jurisdictions, the challenge is meeting overlapping but distinct regulatory demands through a single governance approach.

DORA requires financial entities to identify all ICT assets, map dependencies, set impact tolerances, and demonstrate they can maintain operations within those tolerances during disruption. This demands connected data, automated workflows, and real-time visibility.

ServiceNow as the compliance backbone

ServiceNow's Integrated Risk Management and Operational Resilience modules provide the connected infrastructure DORA demands. ICT risk management maps directly to Risk Management capabilities with automated risk assessment and monitoring. Incident classification and reporting workflows automate the strict timeline requirements DORA imposes. Third-party risk management provides the concentration risk visibility and oversight regulators expect.

Business service mapping — connecting services to applications, infrastructure, people, and third parties — addresses DORA's critical function identification requirements and the UK's important business service mapping obligations simultaneously. A single platform approach eliminates the fragmented tooling that makes cross-jurisdictional compliance unmanageable.

Getting started: the gap analysis approach

The whitepaper includes a practical gap analysis framework helping organisations assess their current state against DORA requirements. This covers existing ICT risk management maturity, incident reporting capabilities, third-party oversight processes, resilience testing programmes, and information-sharing arrangements. The framework maps gaps to ServiceNow capabilities, creating a prioritised implementation roadmap.