What’s the Point of DORA? A Guide for Financial Institutions

Digital financial services are useless if they’re unreliable. From making a quick card payment to applying for a mortgage, customers expect the services they use to work seamlessly, every time. They have little patience for downtime, and none for excuses. The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is a regulatory wake-up call—a blueprint for financial institutions highlighting the critical importance of protecting services and customers from potential risks. It’s not easy!

Building Resilient Systems Customers Can Trust Is Critical

At its core, the European Union’s (EU’s) DORA regulation seeks to ensure that financial systems can withstand disruptions or recover quickly, so customers aren’t affected. The regulation applies to a broad range of financial institutions across the EU, including banks, insurance companies, payment processors, and tens of thousands of other financial entities that rely heavily on information and communication technology (ICT) for the infrastructure and components that enable modern computing. These interconnected systems power ATMs, mobile banking, trading platforms, and payment gateways, with vendors providing technologies such as customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, cloud storage, point-of-sale (POS) systems, and cybersecurity frameworks. A systemic failure can significantly harm important business services companies need to operate.

Because of that, DORA sets clear standards for how financial institutions should manage risks. This includes anticipating disruptions, preparing recovery strategies, tracking and reporting issues internally and externally, and ensuring continuity even in the face of cyberattacks or technical failures. The goal is simple: a stable financial ecosystem where customers can rely on services, no matter what happens behind the scenes.

There Is No Such Thing as Glitches

Large-scale outages make headlines. But what we often call “glitches” are really the result of deeper issues in design, configuration, or system interactions. Imagine you’re at the grocery store and the card reader malfunctions, or you’re trying to transfer money and the system is down. These might seem like small hiccups, but to the customers dealing with them, they are major failures.

Every minor disruption can erode customers’ trust and make them question their choice of provider. According to a recent Forbes article, global businesses lose more than $400 billion in annual revenue due to payment system downtime. For an individual bank, a single 3.5-hour outage could result in more than $3 million in lost merchant fees alone. The ripple effects are far-reaching, falling like dominoes:

• Lost revenue: Every moment a service is offline represents potential business slipping away, from missed transactions to lost customer acquisitions.
• Recovery costs: Restoring normal operations after an outage often requires many resources. Additional labor, urgent repairs, or even hiring external consultants can add to the financial burden.
• Brand damage: Negative customer experiences are often amplified. Dissatisfied customers can quickly share their frustrations online, tarnishing a brand’s reputation and potentially driving others away.
• Opportunity costs: Downtime doesn’t just disrupt customer interactions; it prevents employees from working effectively, translating into missed opportunities for business development and innovation.

DORA sets sectorwide standards for the EU financial industry to create a consistent approach for monitoring, risk management, and operational resilience while urging institutions to treat every potential weakness as a serious threat.

Avoid Looking at the Big Picture Through a Too-Narrow Lens

Keeping services resilient and earning customer trust is a top priority for financial institutions, but traditional monitoring tools often fall short. They may focus on individual parts of a service—the systems—making it hard to see how a problem in one area might impact the whole. Without true observability—a full, real-time view of everything working together—small issues can slip by unnoticed until they turn into disruptions that shake customer confidence.

Enhanced observability gives teams the complete picture, helping them spot vulnerabilities early and fix problems before they escalate. Automated alerts and intuitive dashboards make it easier to identify critical issues quickly, so teams can spend more time solving them.

After all, DORA isn't just about avoiding risks—it’s about building resilience against them.

Build Operational Resilience with NETSCOUT

NETSCOUT observability solutions provide financial institutions with high-quality, real-time, packet-based insights, alerts, and reporting for DORA compliance and operational resilience that help businesses quickly identify and address risks before they escalate. NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management ensures seamless performance across systems and services, providing a comprehensive view for smooth operations. Our Omnis CyberStream and Omnis Cyber Intelligence network detection and response (NDR) platform enhances security by detecting disruptions early and staying ahead of evolving cyberrisks, no matter how complex financial institutions’ ecosystems become.

With NETSCOUT’s solutions working together, financial institutions can stay on top of vulnerabilities, meet DORA’s compliance requirements, and build resilient services customers can trust.

That’s the point of DORA.
    
Learn how NETSCOUT solutions can help you become DORA compliant and improve your digital operational resilience.

For additional information, read our feature article “Why DORA Is So Important for Channel Partners” in the publication “Intelligent Tech Channels,” where NETSCOUT Director of Security Product Marketing Gary Sockrider explores DORA’s key principles and their impact on channel partners.