EU DORA Operational Excellence - Designing PRACI-Driven Checklists, Logs, Corrective & Preventive Actions, Calendars of operations and Change Management

EU DORA is not a framework. It is an operational liability regime.
With the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), financial institutions are assessed on operational reality, not intent: who decides, who executes, what evidence exists, and whether resilience works under stress.
This book is a practical operational guide for turning DORA from a legal text into a permanent, auditable operating model. It explains how governance, accountability, training, evidence, and decision-making must function across ICT risk management, incident response, recovery, third-party dependencies, and management body oversight.
Grounded in supervisory practice, the book shows why policies, checklists, logs, calendars, PRACI roles, training records, and decision logs are legally implied controls under DORA. It connects regulation to execution, and execution to inspection-ready evidence.
Covering governance, recovery, ransomware, data integrity, automation, inspections, and liability, this book is written for board members, executives, risk and security leaders, auditors, and operational teams who must prove—not claim—operational resilience.
DORA does not ask what you intended.
It asks what you can prove.

Praise for this book

“This is the most operationally credible interpretation of DORA I have seen to date. It does not stop at explaining regulatory intent, but shows in detail how supervisors assess execution, decision-making, and evidence in real inspections and real incidents.”
“A rare and much-needed combination of regulatory precision and practical execution. This book translates DORA into a coherent operating model that can be implemented, defended, and sustained over time.”
“If you are accountable for ICT risk, operational resilience, or recovery under DORA, this book is not optional reading. It is a complete playbook for surviving both incidents and supervisory scrutiny.”
“What makes this book stand out is its realism. It openly addresses failure modes, governance breakdowns, and decision pressure exactly as they occur in real-life crises, rather than presenting an idealised compliance narrative.”
“This is the book regulators implicitly assume you have already read when they start asking detailed questions about recovery, data integrity, and decision authority.”
“Finally, a DORA reference that speaks the language of practitioners who must execute controls under stress, rather than only the language of legal interpretation or abstract frameworks.”
“The annexes alone are worth the price of the book. They provide concrete structures, calendars, and governance mechanisms that most institutions struggle to design correctly on their own.”
“This book succeeds where many others fail: it clearly connects board-level accountability with operational and technical execution, making governance expectations explicit and defensible.”
“A true masterclass in operational resilience under DORA. It shows not only how to comply on paper, but how to act, decide, and document correctly when things go wrong.”
“Where other books explain what DORA requires, this one explains how to actually run a financial institution in a DORA-compliant way, day after day.”
“The focus on decision authority, evidence discipline, and continuous improvement reflects exactly how supervisors evaluate maturity today, rather than how institutions wish they would.”
“An essential reference for banks, insurers, payment institutions, and financial market infrastructures operating in complex, multi-system and multi-party environments.”
“This book will save organisations months of trial-and-error by exposing common pitfalls early and providing proven structures that prevent costly mistakes during incidents.”
“Clear, structured, and uncompromising in its logic, this book sets a new benchmark for what serious DORA implementation guidance should look like.”