DORA: Why Cyber Risk Is Now a Financial and Operational Stability Issue
The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) marks a fundamental shift in how cyber risk is regulated across financial services and how boards are expected to govern it.
DORA is not a cybersecurity regulation in the traditional sense.
It is a financial and operational stability regulation.
What DORA really changes
DORA reframes cyber incidents as operational disruptions that can threaten:
- Market stability
- Consumer protection
- Financial continuity
As the European Banking Authority states:
“ICT risk is no longer a purely technical risk, but a key driver of operational resilience and financial stability.”
This framing matters. It moves cyber risk firmly into the remit of:
- Boards
- Risk committees
- CFOs and CROs
—not just CIOs or CISOs.
Board accountability under DORA
DORA explicitly requires boards to:
- Set and approve ICT risk management frameworks
- Define impact tolerances for disruption
- Oversee third-party and concentration risk
- Review resilience testing outcomes
Crucially, these responsibilities cannot be delegated away.
The Financial Conduct Authority, in parallel, reinforces this through UK Operational Resilience policy, stating:
“Firms’ boards and senior management are responsible for ensuring operational resilience is embedded throughout the organisation.”
Where organisations are exposed
Many firms still manage cyber risk through:
- Technical security reporting
- Control-centric dashboards
- Third-party assurances without governance validation
Under DORA, this creates exposure.
Regulators will test:
- Whether impact tolerances were set before incidents
- Whether trade-offs were consciously approved
- Whether third-party dependencies were understood and governed
Tools alone cannot evidence this.
The RockSec360 approach
RockSec360 aligns cyber risk governance directly to financial and operational resilience language, enabling boards to:
- Quantify ICT risk in business impact terms
- Evidence oversight and decision cadence
- Govern third-party risk continuously
- Defend decisions under regulatory scrutiny
DORA does not ask what tools you run.
It asks how resilience is governed.
The Cyber Risk & Compliance ScoreCard provides a DORA-aligned governance view in under 8 minutes.
