Cyera: Your Guide to Simplifying DORA Compliance

January 2025 marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of information security. As of January 17, 2025, the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) officially takes effect. This landmark regulation is designed to bolster the IT security and operational resilience of financial institutions—including banks, investment firms, payment service providers, and critical third parties—across the EU.

For many organizations, DORA represents a significant shift, mandating robust frameworks for risk management, incident response, governance, and IT resilience. Meeting these stringent requirements can be daunting, but with the right tools, alignment becomes far more manageable.

At Cyera, we are committed to helping our customers across EMEA easily address DORA’s core compliance and resilience requirements. 

Know your data

DORA begins with a critical foundation: understanding and protecting your data. Financial institutions must identify and safeguard their most sensitive assets.

With Cyera our customers are able to automate the discovery and classification of sensitive regulated data across their SaaS, IaaS, DBaaS, and on-premises environments. Give the platforms 95% precision, we help them ensure their know what critical data exists, where it resides, how it’s being used, and what risks it’s currently exposed to 

Proactively Manage Data Risk

DORA mandates proactive management of data risks, requiring institutions to conduct regular risk assessments and address vulnerabilities.

Cyera’s Data Risk Assessment service assesses the customer’s current data security capabilities against 31 known industry frameworks. The service team then works with customers to determine their data attack surface, and develop methods to reduce risks. As part of the engagement the customer receives actionable insights and recommendations into current data misconfigurations, existing data drift, compliance issues, and over-permissive access by employees, third-parties, and even AI-copilots like Microsoft Teams.

Since Cyera continuously scans data and is actively monitoring data events, the customer gets support for real-time risk monitoring to ensure their adhering to DORA standard on an ongoing basis vs. just a single point in time.

Data Incident Detection and Accelerating Response Time

It’s no surprise that Incident detection, management, and reporting are essential components of DORA compliance.

Cyera is designed to provide critical data intelligence insights that prove helpful in the case of an active data incident. For example, the platform provides early detection of events by monitoring how data is being used, identities with access, insights around the context in which the user accesses data (i.e. anomalous behavior, ghost user accessing data, MFA turned off etc.) to root capture suspicious behavior. The platform acts as a data intelligence brain - and passes signals to additional security solutions like SIEM (i.e. Splunk) to provide data context-rich alerts and expedite necessary responses. The platform maintains an audit log of relevant data events to support reporting, making it easier to comply with DORA’s incident response requirements.

The Need for Data Governance and DORA Audit Readiness

Effective governance is at the heart of DORA. Institutions must demonstrate their compliance through governance frameworks, periodic reviews, and of course, regulatory reporting. 

With Cyera, customers can view dashboards and detailed insights tailed to regulatory standards. This data is tantamount to facilitating ongoing audits into relevant data usage, its security posture, and remediative actions that should be taken. Cyera handles this automatically, as opposed to the customer requiring manual documentation - thus simplifying the burden of compliance,

Addressing Third-Party Data Risk Management

DORA has made it clear that third-party risk management should be made a stronger priority for financial institutions operating out of the EU. These organizations must assess and monitor risks posed by third-party service providers, ensure those providers have access to data strictly on a need to know basis, ensure those parties have incident response capabilities tied into the institution's own incident response plans, and that these parties adhere to data minimization principles throughout the data’s lifecycle.

Cyera first maps all data assets handled by third-party providers by identifying and categorizing regulated data stored, or processed, by third-parties to ensure compliance. The platform’s Identity module analyzes which third-parties have overpermissive access to sensitive data, and notifies the customer of potential breaches involving third-party identities. This correlation of data and identity can enable swift, proactive, remediation of data issues. Cyera’s data loss prevention solution can consume Classification insights, track the accuracy of existing DLP policies associated with that data, and uses AI to recommend more highly accurate DLP policies as well. If a data incident were to take place, Cera provides visibility into third-party involvement, helping to right size the scope of the issue, and streamline any necessary collaboration between the customer and that third-party. An important factor to mention is also Cyera role identifying redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT) data that is used by third-parties - helping to ensure third-parties are complying with data retention and deletion policies.

Data Minimization (ROT data) and Lifecycle Management

As part of DORA, institutions are mandated to protect data integrity and confidentiality throughout its lifecycle. And as you might have guessed by now, Cyera can help. 

As mentioned earlier, Cyera identifies ROT data. This helps to not only ensure adherence to data minimization principles, but also helps our customers reduce data storage costs, and reduce their risk exposure by reducing their potential attack surface. Afterall, less data, means less attack surface

Some Key Considerations When Evaluating Data Security Platforms to Help With Your DORA Compliance

As DORA adoption takes place within the EU’s financial institutions, and they look to navigate this new regulation, there will undoubtedly be several vendors offering to support them. So, wanted to leave you with some guiding principles to look for in your evaluations

‍Prioritize Comprehensive Coverage: Your data exists across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Make sure the vendors you evaluate support all of your key data environments and provide both high fidelity, and high precision of data insights that are provided.

Ask about Proactive Risk Management: The right real-time data insights will empower you to remediate issues before they lead to incidents.

Streamlined Compliance: Ensure that the platform has a way to help you automate key compliance workflows. This will reduce manual effort on your end, and reduce the burden of compliance for your team.

Don’t skimp on scale: Architecture matters when it comes to the platforms you are considering. The platform must not only scale to support your data requirements, but that scale will also ensure that the platform can  adapt as you grow, and your regulatory responsibilities evolve.

DORA is here to protect data. So, in the end, while it will create additional work for financial institutions in the EU,  it’s a monumental step forward in our industry. DORA will serve as a beacon for global financial resilience - inspiring other countries across the world, leading to more regulations aimed at protecting the world’s most valuable resource. Data.

At Cyera, we’re here to help. If you need guidance or support, don’t hesitate to reach out.