What is DORA and how AIOps facilitates compliance
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is a European Union (EU) regulation that requires financial institutions to improve their digital operational resilience. DORA creates a uniform regulatory framework across the EU to strengthen the European financial market against cyber risks and IT incidents.
In effect since January 2023, DORA requires compliance by all financial services institutions operating in the EU by January 2025. Compliance requires organizations to integrate DORA regulatory requirements into their incident management processes to ensure they have comprehensive visibility into their Information Communication Technology (ICT). DORA also requires financial institutions to have robust systems in place for proactively detecting, triaging, and resolving incidents before they become outages.
AI-powered IT operations (AIOps) offers a solution to these challenges and can help financial institutions improve operational resilience and maintain compliance.
What DORA means for financial services organizations
DORA applies to financial institutions and ICT providers operating in the EU, as well as ICT service providers supporting them from outside the EU. These compliance regulations also apply to banks, investment firms, payment processors, insurers, exchanges, rating agencies, and other financial organizations. Failure to comply with DORA regulations carries serious consequences, including:
Financial penalties
Financial institutions can face significant fines, potentially reaching up to 2% of their total annual worldwide turnover.
Reputational harm and loss of customer trust
Non-compliance can severely damage an institution’s reputation and customer loyalty by raising concerns about its ability to manage operational risks and ensure reliable services.
Increased governmental scrutiny
Organizations found to be non-compliant are likely to face heightened regulatory scrutiny, which could include audits and further penalties.
Operational disruptions
Failure to comply with DORA can increase the risk of service disruptions and corresponding financial losses.
To address and mitigate these risks, financial institutions need to increase their ability to proactively deal with ICT incidents. By thoroughly analyzing their business operations, they can identify which areas of their IT infrastructure are vulnerable to disruption by ICT incidents. Once those vulnerabilities have been identified, it’s critical to implement solid plans and technology to identify, respond to, and recover from these incidents quickly and effectively.
How AIOps helps with DORA compliance
To meet the incident reporting guidelines required by DORA, financial institutions need solid incident management processes and tools. When implemented effectively, AIOps platforms can help financial services companies significantly reduce service downtime and facilitate proactive IT incident management. AIOps offers solutions to multiple areas specifically outlined in DORA, including:
Proactively monitor for and detect incidents
The complexity of modern financial services IT stacks creates overwhelming volumes of alert noise. When an incident occurs, ITOps teams must manually comb through massive amounts of low-quality, unactionable alerts.
Ninety-one percent of ITOps leaders at financial institutions recognize that AIOps can consolidate siloed data formats. AIOps breaks down data silos between on-premises and cloud-based IT systems and correlates disparate and disjointed data to create a unified, actionable view of an incident. Using AI/ML, AIOps can instantly identify possible incidents, allowing IT operations (ITOps) and IT service management (ITSM) to triage and prioritize them in seconds.
“Siloed information makes it difficult to centralize data and identify important alerts, which creates inefficiencies and extends incident resolution times,” said C Beers, Principal Solutions Architect at BigPanda, in a recent webinar. “Generative AI can help democratize access to operational knowledge so your responders know what’s happening and can act quickly.”
Establish comprehensive and effective incident response and recovery
When an incident occurs, rapid response and remediation rely on quickly finding the root cause. Response teams must identify the details of what happened and why and suggest a course of action as quickly as possible. AIOps can dramatically accelerate root cause analysis by using machine learning and GenAI, to reveal causal relationships, impact, and priority quickly and accurately. This accelerates incident response and dramatically reduces mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR).
These improvements not only help ensure DORA compliance but can also significantly impact your bottom line. For example, BigPanda saved one of our banking customers $8M and 60,000 FTE hours yearly by reducing investigation time with AI-driven incident resolution.
Operationalize CMDB reporting and management
Maintaining an up-to-date repository/CMDB of all ICT assets is a crucial guideline in DORA. AIOps reduces blind spots across ITSM by automatically identifying missing configuration items (CIs) referenced in alerts but not cataloged in the configuration management database (CMDB).
AIOps plays a crucial role in DORA compliance by automating the documentation and continuous updating of IT asset inventories and configurations in a CMDB. This provides a near real-time, comprehensive view of your IT landscape, enabling financial institutions to map interdependencies between systems and identify potential risk areas effectively. This capability directly supports DORA requirements for ICT risk management, vulnerability assessments, and change impact analysis.
AIOps improves your CMDB’s operational accuracy and performance with AI-powered data enhancement. Additionally, AIOps can efficiently analyze and correlate data and present these insights through powerful analytics to provide a comprehensive view of your organizational infrastructure.
BigPanda helps maintain DORA compliance
DORA compliance requires financial organizations to quickly and effectively detect, triage, and resolve incidents to safeguard core financial offerings and ensure their customers don’t experience service interruptions.
AIOps from BigPanda can help ensure banks stay compliant. BigPanda transforms IT noise into actionable insights, dramatically accelerating root cause analysis and reducing MTTR by up to 50%.
AI-powered Event Management gives every operator the context needed for proactive incident monitoring, detection, triage, and prioritization in seconds. BigPanda ingests alerts across the IT infrastructure and consolidates siloed observability, change, topology, and institutional data into a unified view. Alerts are deduplicated, filtered, normalized, correlated, and enriched with valuable context including change, topology, and historical data. This eliminates unnecessary noise and provides responders with actionable insights so they can identify, prioritize, and contain incidents faster.
AI-powered Incident Management helps banks ensure their core services stay up and running to hit critical SLAs. BigPanda uses GenAI capabilities to analyze multi-source data so ITOps and incident management teams can accelerate incident investigation and improve service availability. Biggy AI is an AIOps assistant that gives incident management teams instant access to AI-generated incident summaries, relevant historical insights, and change data so they can understand what happened, why, and what actions to take.
Unified Analytics can help banks report on their ICT environment and continuously evaluate and improve the effectiveness of IT operational processes, including incident management. A core component of DORA is the ability to identify low-performing IT assets and update them to ensure they provide full context. Unified Analytics helps identify gaps while also demonstrating your IT services are compliant. These analytics can also identify areas of your IT infrastructure that need attention when new hosts or elements are introduced without proper enrichment data. With Unified Analytics, your organization has a clear roadmap to improve IT systems management and service availability and demonstrate and communicate DORA compliance to stakeholders, regulators, and clients.
BigPanda helps financial institutions, including the New York Stock Exchange, to ensure exceptional service availability by equipping ITOps teams with actionable incidents for quick investigation and response. To learn more about how AIOps optimizes incident management, enhances ITSM and observability tools, and helps ensure compliance, check out our AIOps buyer’s guide for financial services IT.
“AIOps saves us a lot of time and lets us focus on resolving problems instead of combing through thousands of alerts to discover problems. I’ve been at this game for over 20 years, and this is the first time I’ve had any real success in doing that. It’s really transformational and game-changing.”
Chuck Adkins
Chief Information Officer, New York Stock Exchange
