The 2025 DORA Deadline is Here: Simplify Compliance with Teleport

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) comes into full effect on January 17, 2025. This deadline marks a monumental shift in how financial institutions and their technology providers prioritize and maintain operational resilience and cybersecurity standards – and sets in stone real business and regulatory consequences to ensure resilience is achieved.

And like any sweeping security regulation, organizations must embark on an uphill journey to earn full compliance. One of the biggest challenges? Building resilience across the growing mountain of infrastructure that financial institutions and technology providers rely on every day.

In this blog, we’ll recap the key requirements (and major infrastructure-related challenges) posed by DORA. Then, we’ll explore the ways in which Teleport’s secure infrastructure access platform can simplify your journey towards achieving DORA compliance – even with the most complex infrastructure.

The infrastructure security challenges of DORA

DORA aims to create a unified framework for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) risk management, ensuring financial institutions across Europe can withstand, respond to, and recover from ICT disruptions. But like similar regulations around the globe (many of which DORA has significant overlap with, including NIST 800-53), today’s complex infrastructure environments may complicate the journey towards achieving full compliance – for both financial institutions in the EU and their technology partners.

Challenges for financial institutions

Financial institutions have a complex blend of traditional on-premises hardware alongside modern cloud-native components. This variance can make it challenging to maintain visibility and unified policy enforcement in line with DORA reporting and incident response requirements. Enforcing consistent access controls across disparate infrastructure elements may require a great deal of manual effort, but is crucial for addressing DORA’s requirements about minimizing unauthorized access risks.

Challenges for ICT providers and software vendors

For the ICT providers and software vendors supporting these financial organizations, maintaining compliance with the security standards of the regulation is also mission-critical to ensure business longevity as well as resilience. Per the regulation, DORA-subjected firms are required to terminate contracts with non-compliant ICT providers.

Like financial institutions, ICT vendors must be ready to prove and present the same reporting, incident response, and secure access capabilities outlined in the framework. Though not tethered to the same blended infrastructure, vendors (and particularly software providers) have equally complex infrastructure of their own to reckon with. Development pipelines are fueled by ephemeral, auto-scaling, and cloud-native components (like Kubernetes), creating a uniquely complex web of access points and resources – all of which must be secured, controlled, and auditable.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for all firms subject to DORA is accomplishing all of this without dampening the productivity of engineering and development teams – critical for meeting time-to-market objectives, client needs, and delivering innovation. The right infrastructure access platform can do just that.

How Teleport can simplify DORA compliance

Teleport offers a modern, unified approach to secure infrastructure access that aligns directly with many of DORA's foundational requirements – simplifying compliance both for financial institutions and the technology providers powering their growth.

The Digital Operational Resilience Act is built around a five-pillar framework, emphasizing key aspects of ICT risk management:

1. ICT risk management: Establish robust governance frameworks to assess, mitigate, and monitor ICT risks.
2. Incident reporting: Implement mechanisms to report ICT-related incidents promptly to regulators.
3. Operational resilience testing: Conduct regular tests simulating cyberattacks, natural disasters, and human errors.
4. Third-party risk management: Conduct due diligence and ongoing monitoring of critical ICT service providers.
5. Information sharing: Foster collaboration between institutions and regulators to share insights on ICT threats.

With Teleport, organizations can address multiple requirements within each pillar, paving the way for a smoother compliance journey while significantly improving the cyber resilience and security posture of their organization. Teleport eliminates unauthorized access risks, enhances operational efficiency, and ultimately improves developer productivity – all while meeting stringent compliance standards of DORA and other security regulations. Here’s how.

Eliminate credentials and standing privileges

One of DORA’s key requirements is the protection of information and communication systems by minimizing the risk of unauthorized access.

Teleport directly supports this by eliminating credentials such as passwords, SSH keys, and static tokens, which are often the target of cyberattacks. Instead, Teleport uses ephemeral, short-lived certificates to control access to infrastructure resources – drastically reducing the risks of credential theft, misuse, or human error.

Dynamic access controls

By eliminating standing privileges and moving to dynamic, certificate-based access, Teleport aligns with DORA’s focus on securing systems through minimized privilege and context-based access controls. This approach ensures users only have access to systems when they need it, and that access expires automatically after a session – closing the door to potential backdoor exploits.

Teleport also enables organizations to implement fine-grained access controls, supporting DORA’s heavy emphasis on least privilege and secure remote access – ensuring only authorized and authenticated users can access sensitive resources.

Centralized access visibility and monitoring

DORA emphasizes the importance of continuous monitoring and rapid incident response in order to address emerging ICT risks.

Teleport enables organizations to monitor user behavior in real-time, detecting and quickly responding to potential threats and anomalies – such as unusual login locations or abnormal requests – as they arise. Continuous monitoring capabilities support compliance by providing audit logs for all access events, allowing organizations to identify potential security incidents and maintain a transparent record for compliance purposes.

Operational continuity with automation and real-time response

DORA places heavy emphasis on incident reporting and ensuring operational continuity in the face of ICT-related disruptions.

Teleport’s focus on automated access controls and real-time monitoring helps organizations maintain operational continuity during security incidents. Access can be quickly adjusted or revoked to mitigate risks, preventing further disruptions in the event of a breach.

…all while increasing productivity

Maintaining airtight access security shouldn’t come at the expense of productivity – especially for your critical infrastructure and development teams. Teleport enables organizations to earn DORA compliance while simultaneously increasing the velocity of their developers and easing the management burden on infrastructure teams.

Replacing static credentials with seamless, certificate-based access eliminates time-consuming manual management. Unified access to infrastructure reduces friction for engineers while maintaining the strict security controls regulations that DORA, PCI DSS, and NIS2 require. Features like automated logging and real-time monitoring simplify the compliance reporting process, saving valuable time and resources while increasing the accuracy of audits.

Build resilience and earn DORA compliance with Teleport

Earning compliant access controls and visibility across your infrastructure doesn’t have to be the daunting challenge it may appear. With a secure infrastructure access platform like Teleport, your organization can meet critical DORA requirements and build cyber resilience while simultaneously streamlining engineer and developer productivity. No tradeoff necessary.

Learn more about simplifying your journey towards DORA compliance with Teleport in our white paper, Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA): Navigating Compliance with Teleport.

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