DORA software for banks and insurers: What it needs to cover

Your register of information is complete. Yet when a provider fails, nobody can establish which business function must recover first, which systems it needs or whether the last recovery test demonstrated that. An important DORA component is complete, while operational resilience remains unresolved.

This selection aid connects DORA work areas with specific procurement questions. A claims-handling disruption tests whether software leads from impact to a verified measure.

DORA is more than a requirements catalogue

The regular ICT risk management framework requires a connected picture of functions, information assets, ICT assets and dependencies. Article 11(5) requires a business impact analysis for severe business disruptions. Article 12 addresses backup and recovery. Other chapters concern incidents, testing and ICT third-party risks. The legal basis is the DORA Regulation.

First establish your scope and whether the regular or simplified framework applies. The procurement questions below target a comprehensive workflow; they do not replace that classification.

This table is our procurement aid, not an exhaustive statutory catalogue. Explicitly add requirements for reporting, register formats and existing specialist systems.

A BIA must explain when disruption becomes intolerable

“Business-critical: yes” does not answer how an outage escalates. An insurer’s claims handling, a payment function and an internal reporting system have different time requirements. Peak periods and accumulated backlogs also change the assessment.

Kopexa’s process-level BIA guides you through scoping, impact dimensions and time windows. You assess impacts over time, define tolerable data loss and minimum operating levels, and justify recovery objectives. Approved assessments remain as immutable versions. The BIA product documentation describes the workflow and approvals.

You can test this during selection: change an assumption and create a new BIA version. Can you later explain why the earlier decision differed? A current number without its original assessment basis cannot answer that.

According to the documentation, a dedicated resources step in the BIA wizard is still planned. During the pilot, check how to record required resources with functions available today.

Process management turns recovery objectives into a workflow

The recovery time objective, RTO, defines how quickly a process should be available again. A recovery plan also needs a workflow: who decides to enter fallback operation? Which approval is required for switching? Who then checks data consistency and business functionality?

Kopexa’s BPMN processes can describe these handovers. Information assets, other assets, risks and measures give them context. Evidence belongs to measures, which are mapped to relevant controls. A recovery test remains part of the same implementation rather than becoming an isolated PDF in an audit folder.

BPMN is a modelling option, not a notation prescribed by DORA. Drawing a recovery workflow does not perform a technical switchover either. Operations, testing tools and GRC must work together.

Test the register, supplier risk and exit separately

One provider can deliver several services. One service can support several functions. Your test should therefore go beyond the company name: change a specific contracted service and trace the consequences for register data, risk decisions and exit planning.

The register additionally requires prescribed fields, validation and the appropriate output format. A generic CSV export does not promise a submission-ready register. Our guide to DORA register data quality helps with assessment.

Incident management and regulatory notification are separate services too. Ask for reporting routes and interfaces to be demonstrated instead of inferring a supervisory reporting channel from the presence of an incident module.

One end-to-end selection case for your shortlist

Use a fictional disruption to a claims-handling service. The service fails; an alternative operating route exists, but data reconciliation remained unresolved in the last test.

Take every provider through the same chain: identify the affected business function, explain impact and recovery objectives, trace the provider dependency, review the open test finding and open its measure and evidence. Finally, the responsible management team should recognise the residual risk and the decision required.

Assess more than whether every element exists individually. What matters is whether participants can establish the relationship without an additional Excel mapping. Also test roles, traceable changes and export of decision-relevant records.

When Kopexa belongs on your shortlist

Kopexa lets you work on the relationships between process, BIA, information assets, other assets and security measures. Use a bounded business process during the two-week guided trial.

If your other workflows already work and only a particular supervisory output format is missing, a specialist register solution may be the more focused purchase. Base that decision on the gap you actually need to close.