Compliance with the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA): A methodological and operational perspective on ICT and Cyber risk management regulated by DORA (TechEssentials!)

The ambition of this text is to explain how Operational Resilience is not only a technical issue but also, and above all, a strategic and cultural aspect, understanding the main differences between business continuity and operational resilience.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the limits of focusing exclusively on survival during disruptions. While business continuity emphasizes maintaining "critical operations during periods of unplanned disruption," operational resilience promotes proactive adaptation to an ever-changing environment. The shift is from simply "restoring activities exactly as they were before the event" to "managing change, reducing impacts, and defining a new operational normal."
A key distinction lies in the perception of risk. Business continuity plans primarily focus on mitigating the likelihood of disruptions. In contrast, operational resilience acknowledges their inevitability, shifting the focus from "if something will happen to when something will happen." This approach ensures that organizations are better prepared for a broader range of potential threats. While business continuity emphasizes processes and procedures to return to a pre-disruption state, operational resilience fosters a holistic and integrated framework rooted in organizational culture.
This includes "looking at operations from all angles" and leveraging "a diverse set of skills, experiences, and leadership" to ensure collaboration and integration across all departments. Operational resilience builds on the foundations laid by business continuity. Instead of focusing exclusively on a limited set of processes, it encourages a "deeper strategy" that must adapt to the ever-evolving business context.
Operational Resilience, therefore, represents an organization's ability to continue operating and effectively respond to disruptive events, but also to day-to-day incidents, maintaining control of its essential functions and adapting to the newly emerged contingency. Strategically, Operational Resilience must be integrated into business planning and long-term decisions. This means that organizations must consider resilience as a non-negotiable priority, embedding it in their strategies, including those for evolution, business continuity, and disaster recovery.
From a cultural perspective, operational resilience requires a mindset shift at all levels of the organization. The text includes an introduction to the DORA regulation in its essential elements. Subsequently, 20 reflections will be illustrated that will explore in detail the operational and cultural aspects of the implementation path of compliance with operational resilience. These reflections aim to help think about practical guidelines, the main points to focus on, and how to implement a culture of resilience that is integrated and rooted in the organization's daily operations.
The goal is to make it unnecessary to check the regulations for every single aspect of this journey but to understand the regulator's requirements more deeply, thus better respecting the regulatory perspective and designing a coherent, sustainable, and progressive evolution over time.
The last part of the text includes 300+ questions and their respective answers for articles 1 to 31 of the DORA regulation. Going through these questions and answers, after reading the 20 reflections, allows consolidating one's knowledge of the regulation and its implementation impacts on one's company.