How DORA Impacts Mainframe Security and Why It Matters
DORA and Mainframe Security: The Compliance Challenges You Can’t Ignore
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is a European Union regulatory framework aimed at bolstering the digital resilience of financial institutions and their service providers. With a compliance deadline set for January 17, 2025, organizations, particularly those relying on mainframe systems, need to adapt to meet its comprehensive requirements.
DORA stands apart from other regulatory frameworks by imposing severe consequences for non-compliance, including substantial fines and even potential jail time. By following industry-recognized security best practices, MainTegrity CSF helps organizations navigate compliance requirements with confidence. It also strengthens their ability to proactively detect, prevent, and respond to security threats. By enhancing ICT risk management, incident response, resilience testing, and compliance processes, MainTegrity CSF empowers financial institutions to build greater trust and reliability in the financial ecosystem, helping them stay ahead of regulatory scrutiny and avoid severe penalties. With mainframes playing a pivotal role in these operations, the alignment of DORA’s goals and MainTegrity CSF’s capabilities represents a powerful combination for achieving operational resilience and regulatory compliance. Below is a summary of DORA’s focus areas and how MainTegrity CSF provides valuable solutions:
ICT Risk Management (Article 5): Proactively identify and manage ICT risks through real-time monitoring and anomaly detection.
Incident Detection and Reporting (Articles 16 and 17): Streamline the identification and regulatory reporting of cybersecurity incidents.
Resilience Testing (Article 23): Ensure preparedness with regular system testing and validation.
System Recovery and Resilience (Article 11): Recover operations swiftly while maintaining data and system integrity.
Proactive Threat Management (Article 18): Mitigate risks with advanced detection and response capabilities.
DORA’s mandate for robust ICT risk management (Article 5) emphasizes the need for financial entities to establish governance frameworks, assess and mitigate risks, and continuously monitor their ICT systems. Mainframes, which process critical data and transactions, are a vital part of this strategy and require reliable monitoring solutions. While MainTegrity CSF is not a standalone solution for fulfilling all of Article 5’s requirements, it provides critical support through advanced anomaly detection, real-time integrity monitoring, and detailed logging. These capabilities enable organizations to detect unauthorized changes, maintain trusted baselines, and integrate insights into broader governance frameworks. By complementing other tools and strategies, MainTegrity CSF plays a key role in addressing ICT risks and supporting compliance with DORA’s resilience objectives.
Articles 16 and 17 of DORA focus on incident detection and reporting, requiring institutions to quickly identify and notify regulators about security breaches. MainTegrity CSF simplifies this process by automating the detection of malicious activities, such as insider threats or ransomware attacks. The system’s ability to generate detailed reports ensures that institutions can communicate effectively with regulators while minimizing disruptions.
Resilience testing, as required under Article 23, ensures organizations are prepared for potential disruptions. While organizations must independently arrange for simulated attack scenarios, MainTegrity CSF supports these efforts by maintaining integrity baselines, monitoring for deviations during tests, and validating the restoration of systems to a trusted state. Additionally, MainTegrity CSF keeps detailed logs of system changes, which can provide invaluable insights during and after simulated attacks, helping organizations evaluate vulnerabilities and refine their recovery processes. This capability reinforces operational resilience and aligns with DORA’s emphasis on thorough testing practices.
The need for rapid recovery and operational resilience, emphasized in Article 11, is a cornerstone of DORA. MainTegrity CSF’s File Integrity Monitoring (FIM+) capabilities, combined with its integration with immutable backups, enable organizations to identify and recover the last trusted state more efficiently. This streamlined recovery process minimizes downtime and ensures that tampering is quickly detected and addressed, providing administrators with the tools and confidence to restore operations securely and reliably.
Article 18, which focuses on the classification, management, and reporting of ICT-related incidents and cyber threats, underscores the importance of robust incident management processes. While MainTegrity CSF does not classify or manage incidents directly, it provides critical support by gathering detailed system information and logs. These logs can be instrumental in incident reporting, helping organizations meet their regulatory obligations and provide accurate data for analysis and classification. By enhancing visibility into system changes and potential anomalies, CSF supports organizations in understanding and documenting incidents as part of a broader incident management strategy.
MainTegrity CSF is designed on a foundation of industry best practices, aligning with established security frameworks to support both regulatory compliance and cybersecurity. Many organizations focus heavily on securing their open systems, often assuming that mainframes are inherently secure. However, this misconception can leave critical infrastructure exposed to significant risks. CSF addresses this challenge by providing continuous monitoring and proactive detection, ensuring that mainframes receive the same level of attention and protection as distributed systems. By maintaining comprehensive logs and streamlining compliance efforts, CSF helps organizations not only in achieving regulatory compliance, but also prevents breaches before they escalate.