Matthias Canisius, Head of Sales at Mondoo

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) came into force in January 2025, establishing a comprehensive regulatory framework for financial institutions and critical ICT service providers across the EU. Preparations for this legislation began several years earlier, requiring a fundamental overhaul of how companies manage risks in information and communication technology (ICT). Security teams are now seeking solutions that translate compliance requirements into a manageable, continuous process for improving ICT risk management. Above all, they are concerned with how automation and Agentic AI can be leveraged in this context.

The DORA Challenge for Security Teams

DORA aims to harmonize and strengthen the digital operational resilience of the financial sector and critical ICT service providers in the EU. It imposes binding rules on all companies, ranging from banks and insurance providers to investment firms and crypto-asset service operators. The regulation focuses on ensuring that these organizations can withstand, respond to, and recover from all types of ICT-related disruptions and threats.

Compliance under DORA covers several key areas, including ICT risk management, incident reporting, resilience testing, and third-party risk management. For security and IT teams, the primary focus should be ICT risk management. This requires a robust framework to identify, classify, and remediate vulnerabilities across the entire digital infrastructure. Manually tracking assets, correlating vulnerabilities with regulatory articles, and generating audit evidence is an immense, time-consuming task prone to human error.

Challenges of a Manual Approach

• Time consumption: Teams spend countless hours creating spreadsheets, reconciling data, and writing reports instead of focusing on strategic security initiatives.
• Compliance gaps: Without a unified view, vulnerabilities may be overlooked, or remediation efforts may not be properly documented, leading to potential compliance violations and associated consequences.
• Audit stress: Preparing for audits can disrupt day-to-day operations. Security teams often need to compile documentation and demonstrate compliance, making audits a burdensome exercise rather than a strategic safeguard.

Automation as a Solution

Platforms such as Mondoo enable companies to automate their vulnerability management programs in line with DORA’s strict requirements. Automation ensures continuous compliance with minimal manual effort while generating fully auditable reports. DORA requirements are integrated directly into the vulnerability management workflow. The framework comes preconfigured and ready to use: vulnerabilities are automatically mapped to specific DORA articles and requirements, and the entire IT environment is continuously monitored. Emerging threats are identified in real time and evaluated against the DORA framework.

Instead of periodically checking compliance status, security teams gain a dynamic, live overview of the current situation. This proactive approach ensures that teams are always up to date and can resolve potential issues before they lead to compliance violations. The platform consolidates vulnerability data from across the IT environment—covering local servers, cloud infrastructure, and applications—into a single, unified dataset. This data is automatically compared against DORA requirements, eliminating the need for manual reconciliation of CVEs, misconfigurations, and regulatory articles. The system independently categorizes and prioritizes vulnerabilities based on risk and compliance impact, and reports any deviations so responsible personnel can respond immediately, maintaining a robust security posture 24/7.

Each finding includes detailed remediation guidance, enabling developers and IT operators to understand precisely what steps are required to resolve issues. Risk-based prioritization ensures that teams focus on the most critical vulnerabilities—those posing the greatest threat to operational stability and compliance. This targeted approach optimizes the vulnerability remediation workflow, reduces mean time to remediate (MTTR), and demonstrably strengthens the organization’s security posture.

Conclusion

DORA is now in force, but compliance alone is not sufficient. Innovation cycles are not driven by regulatory mandates, and the potential for automation—especially through Agentic AI in vulnerability management—is significant. Organizations that leverage these technologies can not only ensure continuous compliance but also proactively enhance operational resilience and security.

Learn more about how DORA is implemented on the Mondoo platform here: Mondoo 2025 Release Highlights.