How to prepare for the Digital Operational Resilience Awareness ACT as a business Analyst in any UK organisation
The Digital Operational Resilience Awareness (DORA) ACT is a significant piece of legislation designed to enhance the resilience of UK financial services firms. DORA will effectively take place from early 2025 and will impact financial services firms in the UK, As business analysts, our role is crucial in ensuring that your organization is prepared for its requirements. Here's a breakdown of some areas you can put in motion or prepare for:
1. Understand the DORA ACT:
- Key requirements: Familiarize yourself with the specific obligations imposed on financial services firms by the DORA ACT. This includes the need to identify and manage risks, develop incident response plans, and conduct regular testing and documented evidences.
- Impact on your organization: Assess how the DORA ACT will affect your business processes, systems, and data. Identify any potential vulnerabilities or gaps in your current practices. This is vital to enabling structures and systems in place to maintain compliance with the ACT.
2. Collaborate with Relevant & Responsible Teams:
- IT and security: Work closely with your organization's IT and security teams to understand their existing resilience measures and identify any areas that need improvement.
- Risk management: Collaborate with risk management professionals to assess the potential risks to your organization's digital operations and develop strategies to mitigate them.
- Business continuity planning: Engage with the business continuity planning team to ensure that your organization has robust plans in place to recover from disruptions.
- Change Leadership: Ideally for any project or change to succeed, it is vital to have a C suite leadership in charge of the initiative. This will give the project the oomph needed to take off
3. Conduct a Resilience Assessment:
- Identify critical functions: Determine the core functions that are essential for your organization's operations and identify the digital systems and data that support them.
- Assess risks: Evaluate the potential risks to these critical functions, including cyber threats, hardware failures, and human errors.
- Develop mitigation strategies: Create a plan to address identified risks, including implementing appropriate controls, backup procedures, and incident response mechanisms.
4. Develop Incident Response Plans:
- Define incident types: Categorize different types of incidents that could occur, such as cyberattacks, data breaches, or system failures.
- Create response procedures: Develop clear and concise procedures for responding to each type of incident, including steps to contain the damage, notify relevant stakeholders, and restore operations.
- Test response plans: Conduct regular drills and simulations to ensure that your incident response plans are effective and that staff members are trained to execute them.
5. Conduct Regular Testing and Monitoring:
- Vulnerability assessments: Regularly assess your organization's systems and networks for vulnerabilities and take steps to address them.
- Penetration testing: Simulate attacks on your systems to identify weaknesses and test your security measures.
- Monitoring: Implement continuous monitoring of your digital operations to detect anomalies and potential threats.
6. Stay Updated on Regulatory Developments:
- Monitor changes: Keep track of any updates or amendments to the DORA ACT or related regulations.
- Adapt your practices: Ensure that your organization's resilience measures are aligned with the latest regulatory requirements.
By following these steps, you can help your organization meet the requirements of the DORA ACT and improve its overall resilience to digital risks. It is vital that compliance is in place and all evidences that will be called upon regularly are documented and made ready. DORA fines are heavy and impactful and businesses do well to make sure compliance is in place.
As business analysts, our role is to help the business remain in business, and compliant to DORA requirements.
Let me know if i have missed out any bit in this write up. Happy to update with your input.
