Introduction

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is on the horizon, poised to transform how industries approach risk management and resilience in our increasingly digital world. Scheduled for full implementation in 2025, this EU regulation will redefine standards for information and communications technology (ICT) risk management, affecting the financial sector and all industries.

As organizations gear up for DORA's arrival, industry leaders and analyst firms like Gartner, EY, and Deloitte underscore the importance of early preparation. With regulations taking shape ahead of the 2025 deadline, now is the time for organizations to lay the groundwork for compliance and resilience.

Here's a closer look at DORA and its implications for organizations across all sectors.

Understanding DORA

The European Union has enacted a landmark regulation called the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) to tackle the growing challenges of digital security and operational resilience. Organizations operating in the EU must implement strict practices to protect their digital operations from potential threats and vulnerabilities.

DORA focuses on four key pillars:

• Governance and Risk Management

• ICT Incident Reporting

• Third-Party Risk Management

• Information and Intelligence Sharing 

• Digital Operational Resilience Testing 

The Digital Operational Resilience Testing pillar is significant as it emphasizes resilience testing for organizations to withstand and recover from disruptions. Chaos Engineering platforms like Steadybit play a crucial role here and help you to recognize risks and their effects at an early stage and learn how to deal with them.

Steadybit's Role in Testing Digital Operational Resilience

Steadybit is helping organizations achieve digital operational resilience through Chaos Engineering. Steadybit enables organizations to proactively identify system reliability issues by simulating potential issues through fault injection experiments and reliability tests.

Steadybit specializes in digital operational resilience testing, providing resiliency testing, reporting, and organizing exercises to help with DORA compliance.

Preparing for DORA with Steadybit

Navigating the complexities of DORA compliance requires a structured approach. Here are three steps organizations can take to prepare for DORA resilience testing with Steadybit:

1. Identify and Address System Vulnerabilities: Advice meticulously analyzes your system's configurations, identifying potential vulnerabilities and areas for improvement. It provides precise, actionable recommendations to enhance system robustness, from optimizing Kubernetes setups to ensuring effective redundancy across nodes and availability zones.

2. Define and Build Test Scenarios: To ensure resilience, it is important to clearly define objectives and controls and convert them into practical test scenarios. Steadybit's platform enables organizations to create custom tests based on past incidents, industry standards, and disaster scenarios.

3. Operationalize Resilience Testing: Define the scope of testing plans, add services and applications to Steadybit, and roll out standardized test suites to operationalize resilience testing across the organization. Steadybit offers a wide range of integrations with observability tools that reduce the need for manual oversight. This allows organizations to shift from ad-hoc testing to a more systematic approach. Steadybit's extensibility approach is holistic, meaning you can easily add new targets, attacks, and checks by implementing extensions, which Steadybit will integrate seamlessly.

4. Reporting and Evidence: Optimize reporting and evidence capture to meet compliance standards quickly. Steadybit captures important data with every test to ensure compliance. This is made possible by the deep integration into monitoring solutions such as Datadog, NewRelic, Instant, Prometheus or Dynatrace.

Conclusion

DORA provides a unique opportunity for organizations to enhance their digital resilience and prepare for the future rather than just being a regulatory requirement. By using Steadybit, organizations can move beyond compliance and build robust infrastructures capable of withstanding digital disruptions.

Are you ready to embrace the challenges and opportunities of DORA? 

Let's connect and exchange insights on preparing for the future of digital resilience across all sectors!