DORA Risk Assessment Template

What is the DORA risk assessment template?

The DORA Risk Assessment Template is a tool for financial entities in the EU to determine how well their critical third vendors align with the standards of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). This downloadable toolkit offers the DORA template as an editable PDF document, allowing it to be repeatedly used to evaluate DORA compliance and track alignment improvements across your vendor ecosystem.

This page offers the DORA risk assessment template as part of a toolkit, which comprises the following components:

• DORA vendor security questionnaire template: This editable vendor questionnaire, available in XLSX format, gathers evidence about how well critical third-party technology service providers align with DORA's technical standards for ICT systems.‍
• DORA risk assessment template: A document outlining a vendor's  DORA alignment efforts based on evidence gathered from the questionnaire template in this toolkit and other evidence sources.

Which organizations should use a DORA risk assessment template?

A DORA risk assessment template benefits any organization subject to the DORA regulation, which includes entities in the EU financial sectors and any vendors providing ICT services to the EU financial services sector. DORA compliance is not just limited to traditional financial services, like banks. The following entities could also utilize a DORA risk assessment template to track the impact of third-party risks on their level of compliance with the regulation:

• Credit institutions: Entities such as banks and credit unions providing loans, mortgages, and credit services.
• Payment institutions: Companies handling payment services, including money transfers.
• Account information service providers: Providers of services that access financial data on behalf of users.
• Electronic money institutions: Institutions that issue digital currency.
• Investment firms: Firms offering financial advice, investment management, or stock trading services.
• Crypto-asset service providers and issuers of asset-referenced tokens: Entities that manage digital currencies or tokenized assets.
• Central securities depositories: Organizations that provide the infrastructure for securities settlement.
• Central counterparties: Institutions responsible for clearing trades.
• Trading venues: Platforms facilitating the trading of financial instruments.
• Trade repositories: Repositories that store financial trade data.
• Managers of alternative investment funds: Entities managing hedge funds and other alternative investments.
• Management companies: Companies that manage investment funds.
• Data reporting service providers: Entities providing financial data reporting services.
• Insurance and reinsurance undertakings: Insurance companies providing insurance and reinsurance services.
• Insurance intermediaries, reinsurance intermediaries, and ancillary insurance intermediaries: Intermediaries involved in insurance and reinsurance services.
• Institutions for occupational retirement provision: Providers of pension schemes.
• Credit rating agencies: Agencies that assess the creditworthiness of entities.
• Administrators of critical benchmarks: Organizations that manage financial benchmarks.
• Crowdfunding service providers: Platforms facilitating crowdfunding services.

Any organization in the EU financial ecosystem that relies on ICT services for its operations can benefit from using a DORA risk assessment template

Why is a DORA risk assessment template important?

A DORA risk assessment template is an important tool for helping organizations bound to the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) track their compliance with the regulation. It is particularly helpful for systematically evaluating the impact of third-party security risks on ICT resilience.

A DORA risk assessment template could be an essential inclusion in your Third-Party Risk Management toolbox for the following reasons:

• Supports DORA compliance: This template helps organizations in the EU finance sector systematically evaluate the impact of third-party vendors on their alignment with DORA's stringent requirements for ICT risk management, operational resilience, and incident reporting.
• Mitigates third-party risks: By evaluating the importance of Third-Party Risk Management, this DORA risk assessment template could help organizations strengthen vendor security postures, reducing the potential of security incidents occurring from compromised third-party vendors.
• Enhances incident response: With DORA requiring organizations to have robust ICT incident reporting and response mechanisms, a DORA risk assessment template could help organizations evaluate and improve their readiness to respond to ICT-related incidents.
• Supports business continuity: A DORA risk assessment template can be used to evaluate the stability of ICT systems and services provided by third-party vendors during a cybersecurity incident. Such preemptive risk management supports the ongoing availability of essential services, even if a critical vendor falls victim to a cyber attack. 
• Streamlines audits and inspections: A DORA risk assessment template provides organizations with a framework for documenting and managing ICT security risk. The resulting log of risk treatment efforts will help streamline compliance evidence gathering when audits and inspections are conducted by regulatory authorities like the European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs).

DORA risk assessment template example

This example DORA risk assessment template consolidates the DORA compliance risks discovered through the vendor security questionnaire available as part of this DORA risk assessment template toolkit download.

This DORA risk assessment template is divided into four parts:

• Evidence used to generate the risk management: A list of all the sources referenced to complete the DORA risk assessment template.
• Executive summary: A summary of the DORA risk assessment findings based on the listed evidence sources.
• Vendor background: An overview of the vendor being assessed, their primary service offerings, and how these services support the business's strategic objectives,
• Assessment summary: An overview of the vendor's identified DORA alignment risks across six risk categories collectively defining the vendor's security posture.

How to complete the DORA risk assessment template

This DORA risk assessment template toolkit download is comprised of two documents:

• Vendor questionnaire (XLSX format)
• Risk assessment report (PDF format)

Completing the DORA vendor security questionnaire template 

The DORA vendor security questionnaire template in this toolkit is to be sent to each critical third-party technology service provider being assessed against the standards of the Digital Operational Resilience Act. It includes two sections—one for the vendor to complete and another for internal completion 

Vendor component of the questionnaire

The DORA questionnaire template is divided into five sections:

1. Scope: Defines the ICT risk management and resilience requirements vendors must meet to ensure compliance with DORA standards.
2. ICT risk management: Evaluates how vendors manage, mitigate, and monitor ICT risks to ensure continuous operational resilience and compliance with DORA requirement
3. ICT-related incident management, classification, and reporting: Assesses a vendor's processes for identifying, classifying, and reporting ICT incidents in compliance with DORA’s regulatory timelines and standards.
4. Digital operational resilience testing: Evaluates a vendor's practices for regularly testing ICT systems to ensure their resilience and identify vulnerabilities, as required by DORA compliance standards.
5. Managing of ICT third-party risk: Examines how vendors assess, monitor, and mitigate risks associated with their third-party ICT service providers to ensure compliance with DORA requirements.

For each questionnaire item, the vendor has two fields to complete:

• Question response: A response to each question being asked. Options are Yes,” “No,” or “Not Applicable.”
• Implementation details: An explanation of how corresponding controls have been implemented.

The implementation field should always be completed, even when a "No" or "NA" response is given. In such cases, the vendor should explain their reasoning for disregarding associated security controls.

Internal components of the DORA questionnaire template

The internal security team completes the internal component of the DORA questionnaire template. They will determine the resultant risk severity and risk treatment plans of each questionnaire response.

Internal security teams have four fields to complete:

• Risk severity: The degree of potential business impact from the identified risk.
• Risk treatment: The urgency level of required risk mitigation processes.
• Treatment plan details: An overview of required risk mitigation responses to suppress third-party risk exposures within tolerance levels specified in a third-party risk appetite.
• Risk owner: The name of the internal employee assigned to oversee the entire risk treatment process.

Completing the DORA risk assessment template 

There are five sections to complete in this DORA risk assessment template.

1. Vendor overview

This section, which could be considered the title page for this DORA risk assessment template, overviews the main objectives of the risk assessment. A DORA risk assessment isn't always completed to evaluate DORA alignment as a primary objective. Some financial organizations may assess a vendor's ICT risk management efforts against the standard to improve resilience against third-party breaches.

2. Evidence referenced to complete the DORA risk assessment template

This section outlines all the data sources referenced to complete the DORA risk assessment template. You should list the DORA vendor questionnaire template included in this toolkit in the questionnaire component of this section. 

List any additional evidence sources, such as certifications, that were referenced to complete this risk assessment. The more evidence sources you can reference, the more accurate and credible your completed DORA risk assessment template will be to stakeholders and senior management.

3. Executive summary

The executive summary should concisely summarize the risk assessment findings and primary risk treatment plans.

4. Vendor background

The vendor background section should overview the assessed vendor's primary services and how they support the organization's information and communication technology objectives. 

5. Assessment summary 

In this DORA risk assessment example, a vendor's security posture is evaluated across six cybersecurity categories:

• Security Policies and Processes
• Infrastructure and Asset Management
• Data Classification and Handling
• Application Security
• Risk Management
• Recovery and Response

Here is an example of the Security Policies and Processes risk category field in the DORA risk assessment template available in this toolkit. To the right, the number of detected risks across four severity levels are summarized to make the report easier to digest.

6. Key risks

The final section of this DORA risk assessment template summarizes all of the DORA alignment risks associated with the evaluated vendor. Readers preferring a quick summary of this report's findings would skip to this section.

Order your list of identified DORA alignment risks by risk severity, starting with the most critical.

How to use this DORA risk assessment template toolkit

Follow this process process to get the most value from this DORA risk assessment template toolkit.

1. Understand the five components of DORA: Familiarize yourself with the five sections of the DORA vendor security questionnaire template and understand how they apply to your specific Third-Party Risk Management objectives.
2. Customize the DORA questionnaire template (optional): If you're voluntarily aligning with the standards of DORA, not all questionnaires may apply to your cybersecurity strategy or TPRM program. If required, edit the questionnaire to focus on the specific aspect of cybersecurity that matters most to your business. This step isn't critical since even seemingly irrelevant questions could offer additional context to more relevant aspects of the questionnaires.
3. Send the DORA questionnaire template: Send the questionnaire to all appropriate third-party vendors, especially third-party services supporting critical ICT operations, ensuring recipients provide implementation details for all questions.
4. Review vendor responses: Complete the internal component of the questionnaire. aiming to identify alignment gaps between a vendor's ICT risk management practices and the standards of DORA.
5. Complete the DORA risk assessment template: Based on the questionnaire findings, complete the DORA risk assessment template. Define the vendor's current state of alignment and the risk treatment plans required to achieve an ideal alignment state.
6. Continuously monitor the vendor: Implement risk treatment plans and continuously monitor the vendor for emerging risks impacting their level of alignment with DORA.