An AWS Userguide to DORA 

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) emphasizes ICT risk management, incident reporting, resilience testing, third-party risk management, and information sharing. AWS offers a comprehensive suite of tools and services to meet DORA’s stringent requirements while maintaining scalability and automation.    

ICT Risk Management

Effective ICT risk management begins with centralized visibility and continuous assessment: 

• Centralized Security and Compliance Dashboard:
  Deploy AWS Security Hub to centralize and standardize security findings, compliance checks, and threat intelligence across your AWS environment. Use its integrations with other AWS services for automated remediation workflows.  

• Configuration Monitoring and Compliance Enforcement:
  Use AWS Config to monitor resource configurations and enforce compliance rules. Custom Config rules and managed AWS Config conformance packs ensure your infrastructure adheres to regulatory requirements. 

• Risk and Compliance Assessment:
  Implement AWS Audit Manager for evaluation of your environment against frameworks like ISO 27001, GDPR, SOC2, HIPAA or build custom framework for your needs.  

• Resiliency Assessment:
  Leverage AWS Resilience Hub to evaluate and enhance the resiliency of your critical applications. Its comprehensive assessments include recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). 

• Cloud Architecture Best Practices
  Leverage the AWS Well-Architected Framework to ensure that your workloads are built to meet operational resilience and security standards. 

Incident Reporting 

• Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts:
  Configure AWS CloudWatch to monitor application and infrastructure performance. Set up alarms to alert teams about potential issues. 

• Automated Incident Detection:
  Use AWS EventBridge to trigger workflows in response to suspicious activity, integrating seamlessly with Security Hub and CloudWatch for insights. 

• Incident Coordination and Resolution:
  Implement AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager to automate incident resolution processes. Use runbooks to standardize remediation actions and reduce downtime. 

• Centralized Security Aggregation:
  Utilize AWS Security Hub to aggregate and normalize security findings, ensuring all incidents are logged and tracked. Amazon Security Lake helps meet DORA requirements by automatically centralizing and normalizing security data from all regions in AWS and from multiple sources (AWS, third-party, and on-premises) into a standardized OCSF format. 

Digital Operational Resilience Testing 

• Chaos Engineering for Resilience:
  Conduct controlled failure simulations using AWS Fault Injection Simulator to identify and remediate weaknesses in your architecture. 

• Synthetic Testing and Continuous Monitoring:
  Implement AWS CloudWatch Synthetics to simulate user interactions and detect potential disruptions before they impact end-users. 

• Security Posture Assessments:
  Use AWS Security Hub to perform assessments against security best practices and industry standards. 

Resilience in the Cloud

AWS operates under a shared responsibility model where customers retain control over their content and configurations while AWS manages the underlying infrastructure.  

• Proactive Risk Mitigation: AWS’s global infrastructure employs Availability Zones engineered for fault isolation and disaster recovery. These physically separated zones mitigate risks and ensure high availability. 

• Customer-Specific Resiliency Measures: Customers are responsible for backup strategies, encryption, and the proper use of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) tools. AWS Resilience Hub simplifies these processes by enabling the monitoring, assessment, and improvement of workload resilience. 

• Data Control and Encryption: AWS provides tools for customers to encrypt data, manage encryption keys with AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and configure region-specific data storage for regulatory compliance. 

• Data Protection and Fast Recovery with AWS Backup: 

AWS Backup plays a crucial role in minimizing data loss and ensuring fast recovery. It provides centralized, automated backup management across AWS services, enabling efficient protection and recovery of critical data.  

• Disaster Recovery
  AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS) helps organizations to test and recover from unexpected disruptions by enabling the replication of critical workloads to AWS. In AWS you can achieve Sub-second RPO if needed. 

Third-Party Risk Management

• Access to Compliance Reports:
  Utilize AWS Artifact for quick access to AWS compliance reports and agreements, ensuring transparency with third-party service providers. 

• Multi-Account Governance:
  Implement AWS Organizations to manage multiple AWS accounts with consistent governance, applying Service Control Policies (SCPs) across your environment. 

• Approved Service Management:
  Deploy AWS Service Catalog to allow teams to provision only pre-approved services and configurations and maintain compliance requirements. 

Information Sharing and Reporting

• Centralized Log Management:
  Configure AWS CloudWatch or Amazon Security Lake for aggregating application and infrastructure logs, facilitating analysis and troubleshooting. 

• Standardized Security Findings:
  Use AWS Security Hub to generate and share standardized security findings across your organization and with regulators. 

• API Activity Tracking:
  Enable AWS CloudTrail to log, monitor, and retain account activity, providing a detailed audit trail for compliance. 

By leveraging AWS services strategically, organizations can align with DORA requirements while achieving operational resilience and security excellence.  TC2 specializes in designing secure, compliant cloud environments for Hungary’s largest enterprises, ensuring their operations remain resilient and protected. With a deep understanding of AWS and industry-specific needs, we help businesses navigate regulatory challenges while optimizing their digital infrastructure. For more information get in touch with us by filling out the webform below or writing us at info@tc2.hu.