DORA Compliance IT Services for Financial Firms

Why DORA Changes Everything for Financial Services IT

The Digital Operational Resilience Act is not another checkbox exercise. It is the first regulation that treats your technology infrastructure as a systemic risk to financial stability and holds both you and your ICT providers accountable for managing that risk.

Since enforcement began in January 2025, the European Supervisory Authorities have been clear: digital operational resilience is now a board-level responsibility. Your ICT arrangements are no longer an operational detail buried in procurement. They are a regulated function subject to supervisory scrutiny, mandatory testing, and formal incident reporting.

For London financial firms, the January 2026 UK-EU Memorandum of Understanding on financial services cooperation has made DORA alignment functionally unavoidable. The FCA’s own operational resilience framework, in force since March 2025, mirrors DORA’s core principles. Whether you operate under EU jurisdiction directly or through the UK’s parallel regime, the destination is the same.

The Scale of the Challenge

Research from the European Banking Authority published in late 2025 found that 43% of financial entities across the EU had not fully implemented their DORA compliance programmes by the enforcement date. The primary obstacles cited were third-party contract remediation, ICT risk framework documentation, and establishing proportionate resilience testing programmes.

The firms struggling most are those in the 20-to-200 headcount range. Large banks have dedicated compliance and technology risk teams. Sole traders fall below the threshold for the most demanding requirements. Mid-market firms, the hedge funds, asset managers, boutique advisory houses, and payment firms that define London’s financial services sector, face the full weight of DORA obligations with limited internal capacity.

This is precisely the gap a specialist managed service provider fills.

The Five Pillars and What They Demand from Your IT

ICT Risk Management requires a living framework, not a policy document written once and filed. Your IT environment must be continuously monitored, with risks identified, assessed, and mitigated in a documented cycle. Every asset, every dependency, every point of failure must be mapped and managed.

Incident Reporting means your IT provider must be able to classify incidents against DORA’s severity criteria, escalate within the mandated timeframes, and produce root-cause analysis that satisfies regulatory expectations. Ad-hoc ticket systems and informal escalation paths will not pass scrutiny.

Resilience Testing goes beyond annual penetration tests. DORA requires a structured programme including vulnerability scanning, scenario-based testing, and for firms above the threshold, threat-led penetration testing conducted by qualified external testers.

Third-Party Risk Management is where most firms are furthest behind. Every ICT contract must be reviewed against DORA’s Article 30 requirements. Exit strategies, audit rights, data handling obligations, and subcontracting controls must be explicitly documented.

Information Sharing encourages participation in sector-wide threat intelligence arrangements. While voluntary, firms that participate demonstrate a mature approach to resilience that regulators view favourably.

How Nerdster Delivers DORA-Ready Managed IT

We built our managed services model around the requirements that regulated firms face. Our contracts include DORA Article 30 clauses as standard. Our monitoring platform produces the asset inventories and dependency maps that ICT risk management frameworks require. Our incident management process is designed around regulatory reporting timeframes, not just internal SLA targets.

When you engage Nerdster as your managed IT provider, we begin with a structured DORA gap analysis. We map your current ICT arrangements against each pillar, identify where you fall short, and build a remediation plan with clear milestones.

We coordinate resilience testing programmes with specialist partners, manage vulnerability scanning cycles, and maintain the documentation trail that proves continuous compliance. When your compliance officer or external auditor asks for evidence, it exists, it is current, and it is accessible.

DORA compliance is not a project with a finish line. It is an ongoing operational discipline. The firms that treat it as a one-off exercise will find themselves back in remediation within a year. The firms that embed it into how their IT is managed, from day one, will find that compliance becomes a byproduct of good operations rather than a separate workstream.

That is the model we operate, and it is the model your regulators expect.