DORA-Ready Identity Audits for Financial Entities

The **Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)** mandates that financial entities must regularly test and audit their ICT security.

An "Identity Audit" under DORA is not just checking a box. It is a deep dive into the resilience of your access controls.

What Auditors Will Look For

**Access Governance:** Can you prove exactly who has access to your core banking systems right now? Can you show the history of that access for the last year?

**Privileged Access Management (PAM):** How do you protect admin credentials? Are they vaulted? rotated? monitored?

**Segregation of Duties (SoD):** Can the same person initiate *and* approve a wire transfer? (The answer must be no).

Step 1: The User Access Review (UAR)

**Automate It:** Manual spreadsheets don't scale. Use a tool to generate access lists for every application.

**Contextual Reviews:** Don't just show a manager a list of groups like `GRP_FIN_RW`. Show them "This user can Read and Write to the Finance Database."

**Revocation Loops:** If a manager says "Revoke," it must happen automatically. A manual ticket that sits in a queue for 2 weeks is a compliance failure.

Step 2: The Machine Identity Audit

DORA explicitly covers "ICT Assets," which includes machine identities.

**Service Accounts:** Audit every service account. Who owns it? When was the key last rotated?

**Certificates:** Check for expiring SSL/TLS certificates that could cause an outage (an availability risk under DORA).

Step 3: Testing Resilience (The "R" in DORA)

**Red Teaming:** Simulate an identity-based attack. Can your SOC detect a Golden Ticket attack? Can they spot a token theft?

**Recovery:** If your Active Directory is corrupted, how long does it take to restore it? (This is a critical DORA metric).

How Cydenti Helps

Cydenti simplifies the DORA audit process:

**Continuous Compliance:** We don't just audit once a year. We monitor your posture 24/7.

**One-Click Reports:** Generate the "Who has access to what" report instantly for auditors.

**SoD Checks:** Automatically flag toxic combinations of permissions across different apps (e.g., Admin in AWS + Admin in Salesforce).

Conclusion

A DORA-ready audit is about proving control. It shifts the conversation from "We think we are secure" to "Here is the evidence that we are resilient."