The financial sector is facing unprecedented regulatory and operational pressure with the arrival of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). More than just another compliance mandate, DORA reflects a broader shift: regulators now expect institutions to prove—not just declare—their operational resilience in the face of disruption.
Many institutions view DORA as a compliance challenge: a reporting exercise, a governance checklist, or an IT project. But the real leaders see something different: an opportunity to embed resilience into the very DNA of their business operations.
The Problem Isn’t Compliance. It’s Complexity.
Most organizations don’t struggle because they lack awareness of regulatory requirements. The problem lies in fragmented operational visibility – business capabilities, IT services, applications, infrastructure, third-party providers all managed in silos, with no unified system of record.
This fragmentation makes risk management, incident response, third-party oversight, and audit readiness reactive, inefficient, and costly. And it leaves financial institutions vulnerable not just to regulatory gaps — but to true operational disruption.
A Platform-First Approach to DORA
What sets successful organizations apart is a commitment to building operational resilience as an enterprise-wide capability—enabled by an unified digital platform. This is where ServiceNow delivers unique value. Rather than stitching together isolated compliance point solutions, institutions can address DORA through an integrated set of capabilities that work together:
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- The Common Service Data Model (CSDM): Provides the structured, relational data foundation that maps how business functions depend on services, applications, infrastructure, and vendors. This shared model ensures everyone operates from a single source of truth.
- Enterprise Architecture (EA): EA brings critical visibility by mapping business capabilities and business applications to the underlying technology infrastructure. It models dependencies, defines standards, maps integrations, and identifies technology risks. This comprehensive architectural oversight ensures that the relationships captured in CSDM are well-understood, that the business impact of technology failures is clear, and that resilience strategies align with the overall technology landscape and business objectives.
- Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM): Aligns DORA compliance with broader strategic initiatives, ensuring resilience programs are prioritized, funded, and executed effectively—using insights from both CSDM and EA.
- Integrated Risk Management (IRM) : Operationalizes DORA’s ICT risk management framework. IRM links risk assessments directly to services and assets defined in CSDM, automates control testing, and streamlines reporting. This includes managing a library of controls mapped to DORA articles, automating compliance testing, managing policy exceptions, and generating evidence for regulatory reporting.
- Business Continuity Management (BCM): Directly addresses continuity and disaster recovery requirements. BCM uses CSDM to understand service and application dependencies and conduct business impact analyses (BIAs) to identify critical processes and recovery time objectives (RTOs and facilitates the creation, maintenance, and testing of business continuity and IT disaster recovery plans. In turn, institutions can respond and recover from significant ICT disruptions as mandated by DORA.
- Vendor Risk Management (VRM): DORA places significant emphasis on managing risks associated with ICT third-party providers. VRM enables institutions to assess, monitor, and manage these risks throughout the vendor lifecycle. It uses CSDM to identify critical services and applications dependent on third parties and facilitates due diligence, contract reviews, and ongoing performance monitoring. This helps ensure that vendors meet their resilience obligations and that concentration risks are identified and managed.
- Security Operations (SecOps): SecOps is crucial for meeting DORA’s requirements around ICT-related incident management, threat intelligence, and vulnerability management. It streamlines the detection, investigation, and remediation of security incidents, leveraging CSDM to understand the potential impact of an incident on critical business services and applications. SecOps integrates with vulnerability response tools and threat intelligence feeds, helping to proactively identify and address weaknesses (including those in software components identified via SBOMs in CSDM) before they can be exploited.
- IT Operations Management (ITOM): ITOM ensures the availability, performance, and resilience of the underlying ICT infrastructure and applications that support critical business functions (mapped in CSDM and EA). It provides visibility into the health of these components, automates event correlation to predict and prevent outages, and orchestrates recovery actions. ITOM’s capabilities in discovery, service mapping, and health monitoring are fundamental to understanding the operational state and ensuring that critical services remain resilient.
- Discovery (and Service Mapping): While foundational to CSDM, Discovery (often coupled with Service Mapping) warrants specific mention for its role in DORA. It automates the identification of all ICT assets and their relationships, populating the CMDB with the accurate, real-time data necessary for DORA compliance. This includes hardware, software (supporting SBOM initiatives), business applications, and cloud resources. This comprehensive inventory and dependency mapping is the starting point for risk assessment, impact analysis, and resilience planning as required by DORA.
By integrating these modules on a single platform, all working off the same CSDM data, financial institutions can achieve a holistic and automated approach to DORA compliance. This not only addresses the specific articles of the regulation but also embeds operational resilience into the core of their enterprise capabilities, moving beyond a check-the-box exercise to genuine, sustainable resilience.
This is not about implementing “compliance modules.”
It’s about building a unified operational resilience platform that positions DORA compliance as a natural outcome of better architecture, governance, and execution.
DORA Isn’t Just a Regulatory Requirement — It’s a Maturity Inflection Point
When organizations adopt a platform-first, architecture-led approach to DORA, they don’t just prepare for regulatory audit. They create real-time visibility into their operational dependencies. They strengthen their response to major incidents. They gain confidence in third-party oversight. And they position themselves for future regulatory evolution — all while driving operational efficiency.
The institutions that will thrive under DORA aren’t simply “compliant.”
They are resilient by design. Compliance becomes an organic part of resilient operations.
Let’s Turn Compliance into Capability
If you’re ready to transform DORA from a regulatory burden into a strategic platform for resilience, let’s start the conversation. Speak with an expert today to get started.
