EMEA FS organizations must enhance resilience to meet DORA standards.

2025-07-19

A survey conducted by Veeam Software reveals that 96% of financial services organizations in the EMEA region consider their data resilience inadequate.

Challenges and Priorities

The study, which surveyed senior IT decision-makers from financial institutions in the UK, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, highlights several challenges these organizations face as they strive to meet DORA requirements by January 2025. Despite a significant emphasis on DORA, many encounter various obstacles:

Increased pressure on IT and security teams (41%);
Rising costs from ICT vendors (37%);
Regulations that may impede innovation (22%);
Lack of funds for compliance measures (20%).

Common Struggles

Even with the prioritization of DORA, organizations are grappling with several issues:

Poor recovery and continuity testing (24%);
Inadequate incident reporting mechanisms (24%);
No dedicated DORA implementation leader (24%);
Lack of digital operational resilience testing (23%);
Uncertainties in backup integrity and secure recovery processes (21%).

The most daunting challenge is third-party risk oversight, with 34% finding it difficult to manage. Interestingly, 20% have not yet implemented these measures due to a lack of visibility into third-party operations.

Improving Compliance Through Collaboration

To address the identified challenges and enhance data resilience, Veeam along with McKinsey launched the Data Resilience Maturity Model (DRMM). This framework was developed using insights from over 500 IT and operational leaders. It aids organizations in evaluating their current state of data resilience and facilitates the integration of IT, security, and compliance strategies into a unified approach, thereby boosting overall resilience and DORA compliance.

The Veeam DORA Confidence Survey, which was commissioned by Censuswide, involved 404 senior IT decision-makers from financial services in EMEA regions.

Veeam aims to ensure that businesses can recover with confidence through radical resilience.” Their solutions focus on data protection and recovery, offering backup, security, portability, and intelligence. These tools provide IT and security leaders with the assurance they need for their applications and data to remain protected and accessible across diverse environments including cloud and Kubernetes.