Introduction

In an increasingly digital financial landscape, operational resilience is no longer a mere advantage but a regulatory necessity. The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) sets rigorous standards for financial institutions and critical ICT providers to manage risks, ensure business continuity, and enhance security. As the 2025 compliance deadline approaches, organizations must adopt robust technological frameworks to meet these mandates. Cloud Control’s platform engineering solutions are designed to streamline compliance with DORA, providing the tools and infrastructure needed for resilience, automation, and proactive risk management in today’s fast-evolving digital environments.

  1. ICT Risk Management

DORA requires institutions to establish resilient ICT systems with clear business continuity plans. A platform engineering approach can offer:

  • Automation of Infrastructure:
    Tools like Terraform and Kubernetes provide automation to ensure that infrastructure is consistently provisioned, monitored, and maintained with minimal manual intervention.
  • High Availability & Disaster Recovery:
    Platform engineers can build high-availability systems using multi-cloud strategies to mitigate service outages and ensure that critical services remain operational in case of failure.
  • Continuous Monitoring:
    Platform engineering uses monitoring and alerting tools (such as Prometheus and Grafana) to ensure that any potential issue is detected early, minimizing service disruptions.

  1. Incident Reporting and Response

DORA mandates that financial entities report ICT-related incidents and implement incident response strategies.

  • Proactive Incident Response:
    With a robust platform engineering solution, companies can implement tools like PagerDuty and Grafana Loki for logging and real-time incident response. This ensures rapid incident identification and resolution.
  • Automation for Incident Mitigation:
    Automated workflows in tools like Airflow can help trigger responses such as failover to secondary infrastructure, reducing incidents’ impact on operations.

  1. ICT Third-Party Risk Management

Managing third-party risks is crucial under DORA, especially for cloud platforms and critical ICT service providers. A platform engineering approach ensures:

  • Third-Party Integration Management:
    Platform engineers can create automated workflows to track and manage third-party dependencies, including cloud service providers. They ensure consistent and secure interaction with third-party platforms.
  • Service Escrow and Continuity:
    In case of third-party service failure, platform engineering enables companies to utilize source code escrow agreements or redundant cloud infrastructure to maintain continuity and mitigate service outages

  1. Resilience Testing

DORA requires regular testing of ICT risk management frameworks. Platform engineering helps by:

  • Automated Testing: Platform engineers can automate disaster recovery tests using tools like Jenkins and Ansible, ensuring that resilience strategies are tested regularly and efficiently.
  • Containerization for Replicability: By containerizing applications with Docker and managing them via Kubernetes, platform engineers ensure that resilience tests are reproducible and effective, simulating real-world conditions to identify weaknesses in the system.

  1. Information Sharing

DORA encourages financial institutions to share threat intelligence and cybersecurity information.

  • Shared Platforms for Collaboration: Platform engineering can establish secure, scalable platforms (e.g., Vault by HashiCorp for secrets management) where data can be shared securely between stakeholders.
  • Threat Intelligence Automation: Integrating threat intelligence feeds and automating the dissemination of key information through APIs can improve the organization’s ability to respond to cybersecurity threats.

Conclusion

How Platform Engineering Solves DORA Compliance

As the deadline for DORA compliance approaches in 2025, financial services CIOs and CTOs must prioritize building resilient and secure systems. A platform engineering team with experience in app modernization and migration can help tackle these challenges by leveraging automation, robust cloud solutions, and comprehensive monitoring.

At Cloud Control, we specialize in building end-to-end platform engineering solutions that address the technical and regulatory challenges posed by DORA. Our solutions incorporate automation, cloud management, disaster recovery, and third-party risk management—ensuring that your ICT systems are resilient, scalable, and compliant.

Let’s discuss how we can support your journey to DORA compliance and ensure your systems remain operationally resilient and future-ready.

About The Author

Rejith Krishnan

Rejith Krishnan is the co-founder and CEO of CloudControl, a startup that provides SRE-as-a-Service. He’s also a thought leader and Kubernetes evangelist who loves to code in Python. When he’s not working or spending time with his two boys, Rejith enjoys hiking in the New England outdoors, biking, kayaking, and playing tennis.

About Cloud Control

Cloud Control simplifies cloud management with AppZ, DataZ, and ManageZ, optimizing operations, enhancing security, and accelerating time-to-market. We help businesses achieve cloud goals efficiently and reliably.

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