DORA? The Digital Operational Resilience Act Explained

Implement regular health checks, automated maintenance tasks, and predictive alarms based on workload patterns.

• Enhance visibility through logging mechanisms aligned with DORA's transparency requirements that provide real-time insights into mainframe activities.
• Ensure a proactive approach to potential issues and promote transparency and accountability in line with DORA regulations.

Conduct regular vulnerability assessments, security control enhancements, real-time monitoring, and penetration testing to identify and remediate vulnerabilities unique to the mainframe architecture.

• Stay informed and updated about security patches and updates relevant to mainframe systems.
• Evaluate and update security and enhance access controls, encryption mechanisms, and authentication processes to enable DORA compliance.
• Detect and respond promptly to security threats and integrate threat intelligence feeds to stay informed about emerging mainframe-specific threats.
• Address exposures and vulnerabilities in hardware, system, and security configurations by conducting regular reviews, updates, and security audits.

Develop robust recovery plans and automated backup solutions that include detailed procedures for various failure scenarios.

• Ensure a plan’s testability by conducting simulation exercises and audits to ensure its effectiveness in real-world scenarios.
• Incorporate failover mechanisms to secondary mainframe systems for continuous operations in the face of unexpected failures.
• Automate backup solutions for mainframe data and ensure regular and consistent backups are key components, with an emphasis on testing and validating backup and recovery procedures.
• Introduce immutable copies of critical data to enhance data resilience and establish safeguards against malicious activities and cyberthreats.
• Address ransomware with preventive measures for detecting, isolating, and recovering from ransomware attacks.
• Migrate mainframe backup data and tape data to cloud storage options for improved scalability, availability, and disaster recovery.
• Leverage cloud capabilities to ensure the ability to recover mainframe data anywhere and enhance the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).

Seamlessly integrate mainframe monitoring alerts into the overall enterprise service console to provide a unified view of incidents and effectively manage them across the organization.

• Establish integration and cohesive coordination between the mainframe and the Security Operations Center (SOC), transmitting critical security events in real time for immediate analysis and response.
• Develop automated response playbooks for common threat scenarios on the mainframe, incorporating actions such as isolating affected systems or blocking malicious activity.
• Continuously refine and update automated response mechanisms based on evolving threats to ensure a dynamic and effective incident management approach aligned with DORA standards.

Enforce compliance with vulnerability evaluations, compliance checks, and continuous adherence to regulatory standards to safeguard mainframe systems from potential fines and reputational risks.

• Leverage vulnerability scanning tools specific to the mainframe environment that implement automated processes for identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities.
• Integrate vulnerability assessment results into governance and compliance reporting to streamline processes and ensure adherence to DORA requirements.
• Establish automated compliance checks for mainframe policies, industry regulations, and certificates, with regular audits and validations of compliance requirements.
• Remediate non-compliance issues quickly with automated, recurring, and scheduled reporting that provides timely updates.
• Design governance processes that evolve continuously to align with DORA, ensuring a proactive and adaptive approach to mainframe governance.