Blog
January 14, 2025
For financial institutions across the EU, and for organisations that do business with these institutions, Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) compliance is no longer a “nice to have” — it’s mandatory.
No matter how you’re currently meeting and maintaining compliance with the DORA regulation, automation can improve efficiency and effectiveness of the controls you use to stay DORA-compliant. It also eases burden of manual work and ensures that you’re able to prove compliance to auditors at any time, helping you to avoid expensive fees, downtime, and reputational damage. Here, we’ll dive into why you should consider using policy as code to enforce and maintain DORA compliance across your infrastructure.
Why Automate DORA Compliance Requirements?
By turning DORA mandates into policy as code and enforcing this code with automation, you will drive consistency, efficiency, and value without adding more team resources and manual work for enforcement.
DORA requires organisations to quickly detect, address, and recover from security incidents which can happen at any time. Manual monitoring and detection doesn’t work today in any industry, no matter the regulation. Which do you trust more with your valuables: A single security guard or a comprehensive system of motion detection, alarms, and automatic locks?
There are five key requirements for DORA, all of which require specific tasks to meet and maintain. Many of these tasks can be automated using policy as code, and we’ve built out an example chart to show you what we mean:
DORA Mandate: | Task/Function to Automate: |
| Risk Management |
|
| Incident Management, Classification, and Reporting |
|
| Third-Party Risk Management |
|
| Digital Operations Resilience Testing |
|
| Information Sharing |
|
In short: the bulk of tasks that support each of the five key DORA mandates can be turned into policy as code and implemented in your organisation. Imagine how time consuming and error prone even one of these tasks are, from compliance reporting to managing third-party access. The more of a gap that exists between your current security protocols and the DORA mandates, the more work lies ahead — unless you build from a foundation of policy as code to do the work for you. Here’s why you should consider automation:
Consistency
To become compliant, your security configurations need to be implemented across your entire infrastructure. Automatically rolling out configuration changes with policy as code ensures consistency no matter where your infrastructure resides, whether it's in data centres or in a hybrid of cloud and on-premises.
Security
Automated compliance means that you’re prepared 24/7 if there are any deliberate changes and informed if there is unauthorised compliance drift in your infrastructure. In addition to infrastructure automation, automating data security and compliance is also important. Tools such as Delphix’s data masking can help you transform sensitive data into fictitious values, thus ensuring the real data doesn't fall into the wrong hands.
Efficiency
Your IT and security teams have enough to worry about without spending time running manual security checks and remediating subsequent configuration issues. With automation, you streamline your security processes and gain back valuable time for your teams.
Value
When you centralise your security management and rely on automation, you don’t need to add team resources for implementation and maintenance. Automation helps you maximise what you already have — especially if the DORA mandate requires a heavier lift from your current process.
Back to top
Maintaining DORA Compliance Requirements with Automation
Your organisation will grow and change over time — and it’s very likely that DORA mandates will do the same as they evolve to face the next security challenges. It’s much easier to update policy as code to deploy infrastructure-wide compliance policy change than it would be to update a manual process run by a specific team. This also avoids the technical debt that often accompanies bespoke scripts and poorly documented processes.
Learn more about making an efficient DORA investment in our comprehensive webinar:
With policy as code, you can push out updates automatically. Platform functions like Puppet’s Impact Analysis can show you the impact that changes to code will have on your environment before you roll them out, preventing time-wasting rollbacks and avoiding unplanned downtime.
Regular (and normally time-consuming) compliance maintenance tasks are perfect candidates for automation, such as:
- Continuous Monitoring: Automation can provide continuous monitoring and logging to track compliance status and identify any deviations from established policies.
- Regular Audits: Regular and automated audits ensure that your processes are functioning as expected and that your systems remain compliant with DORA requirements.
- Continuous Improvement: Use continuous evaluations to refine your automation processes to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance overall compliance.
Puppet Enterprise Advanced can help you put compliance maintenance on autopilot, with included features like Impact Analysis (to anticipate the impact of any code updates within Puppet), and Self-Service Automation (which empowers your whole team to turn around faster changes). You don’t have to look for bespoke software for each of these key maintenance tasks; Puppet Enterprise Advanced covers all your bases.
In an ideal world, the initial investment you put into DORA compliance happens once and then you can just forget about it. But in reality, as with virtually every regulation, you will need to prove continuous compliance in an always-changing security landscape.
Back to topDemo Puppet Automation for DORA Compliance Requirements
You don’t have to tackle DORA compliance alone, especially if you seek an automation solution that can optimise your current resources. By leveraging Puppet's powerful automation capabilities, you establish a robust and scalable framework for DORA compliance. This not only helps you meet regulatory requirements but also improves the overall security, stability, and performance of your IT infrastructure. You organisation will then greatly benefit from lowered risk, increased velocity, and avoidance of the negative implications of non-compliance.
You can see a customised demo Puppet’s compliance automation to learn just how easy it is to turn DORA mandates into actionable policy as code: