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.
DORA reframes cyber incidents as operational disruptions that can threaten:
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:
—not just CIOs or CISOs.
DORA explicitly requires boards to:
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.”
Many firms still manage cyber risk through:
Under DORA, this creates exposure.
Regulators will test:
Tools alone cannot evidence this.
RockSec360 aligns cyber risk governance directly to financial and operational resilience language, enabling boards to:
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.