Certified DORA Foundation Training Course

DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) is a new European framework that focuses on embedding a more robust and resilient approach to delivering digital capabilities in financial markets. 

The framework’s purpose is to help financial services companies ensure they can maintain resilient operations through severe operational disruption caused by cyber security and ICT issues.

The DORA risk management framework builds on previous industry-specific guidelines and introduces a single consistent supervisory approach. It aims to harmonise security and resilience practices across financial services companies operating in the EU and their ICT providers. 

DORA applies to more than 22,000 financial entities and ICT service providers operating within the EU, as well as the ICT infrastructure supporting them from outside the EU. The Act introduces specific and prescriptive requirements for all financial market participants including (but not limited to) banks, investment companies, insurance undertakings and intermediaries, crypto asset providers, data reporting providers and Cloud service providers.

DORA defines requirements around consistent ICT risk management, comprehensive resilience testing capabilities (including threat-led penetration testing) and third-party risk management, ensuring a consistent provision of services across the entire value chain.

The five key topics at the centre of DORA are:  

• ICT risk management;
• Reporting on ICT-related incidents;
• Digital operational resilience testing;
• Management of third-party risk; and
• Information and intelligence sharing.

The Act is unique in introducing an EU-wide oversight framework on critical ICT third-party providers, as designated by the European supervisory authorities.

DORA entered into force on 16 January 2023. With a two-year implementation period, financial entities will be expected to be compliant with the Act by early 2025. Audits and inspections could happen before the compliance deadline and may be conducted by the same auditors that judge compliance with other regulatory standards.

There are no prerequisites for this course. However, we recommend reading DORA – A Guide to the Digital Operational Resilience Act as the course is an intensive overview and this book will help with the volume of content. This course is the prerequisite to further specialist DORA training courses such as C-DORA Practitioner, C-DORA Compliance Officer or C-DORA Lead Auditor. If you are looking to progress beyond C-DORA F, you can reduce costs by purchasing one of our combination training courses:

• Certified DORA Foundation and Practitioner Combination Training Course.

• Managers and professionals in risk management, compliance, audit, ICT, and related functions within financial-sector organisations.
• People essential for the provision of financial services who have the following responsibilities:
• Overall management of an organisation.
• Management of online services and processing.
• Management of branches and provision of essential customer services.
• Operation of payments processing and cash distribution services.
• Facilitation of corporate and retail lending and administration of the repayment of debt.
• Processing of claims and renewal of insurance.
• Operation of trading venues and other critical elements of market infrastructure.
• Provision of essential support to allow the functioning of the above roles, such as finance and IT staff.
• Any person working within any ICT third-party service provider that is a sub-contractor to a financial-sector organisation.
• People committed to their continuing professional development with an interest in cyber security best practice.

The instructor-led course takes one day.

You can find out everything you need to know about booking and managing your courses online here. Our DORA experts will be happy to answer any questions in person.

Access will be provided 20 days before the course start date or upon booking, whichever is earlier.