What is DORA?
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA, Regulation (EU) 2022/2554) is Europe's mandatory regulatory framework defining how financial institutions must protect, detect, contain, recover from, and report on information and communication technology (ICT) disruptions. It establishes binding requirements across five pillars: ICT risk management, incident reporting, resilience testing, third-party risk oversight, and information sharing.
DORA raises the bar for what regulators expect from financial institutions. It demands that financial institutions demonstrate operational resilience at all times.
And that starts with knowing exactly who has access to critical systems and data.
Why Identity Visibility is Central to DORA
Modern cyber adversaries rarely break in, they log in. Weaknesses in identity and access management represent the most exploited attack surface in financial services. Yet most organisations have let these weaknesses accumulate silently over the years: dormant accounts, over-privileged service accounts, undiscovered machine identities, and access rights that have never been properly reviewed.
“We wanted a practical solution that could be used and managed by our own people. Elimity fits that approach and gives us the visibility we need to stay in control of identity and access.” - Jan Catrysse - CTO and CISO GEOxyz
DORA's five compliance pillars directly require capabilities that traditional IAM tools (IGA, PAM, CIEM) cannot deliver in isolation. Each tool solves a specific problem but creates its own silo. The result is that identity data is scattered, inconsistent, and incomplete, making it practically impossible for security teams to answer the most fundamental question: who can access what, right now?
Elimity and the IVIP Category
Gartner has introduced the Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platforms (IVIP) category to describe exactly the capability gap financial institutions face. IVIPs gather, categorise, and visualise identity data across directories, tools, and IAM domains. They are not a replacement for IGA, PAM, or CIAM, they are the intelligence layer that makes those investments coherent.
Elimity has been acknowledged by Gartner as a key player in the IVIP category. The platform ingests and unifies identity data from the entire IAM stack: Active Directory, Okta , Azure AD, SailPoint , CyberArk , Workday , AWS , and dozens more. And transforms raw access data into actionable intelligence: toxic combinations, excessive permissions, unused entitlements, and third-party risk.
This makes Elimity uniquely positioned to help financial institutions meet DORA requirements, not by replacing existing IAM investments, but by providing the cross-tool visibility and continuous intelligence that compliance demands.
How Elimity Addresses DORA’s Five Pillars
1. ICT Risk Management (Article 9)
Article 9 requires financial institutions to enforce least privilege and maintain robust IAM policies to prevent unauthorised data access. Elimity’s IVIP layer unifies identity data from all IAM tools (IGA, PAM, CIEM) into a single intelligence view, enabling security teams to instantly identify who has access to what,detect toxic permission combinations, and enforceleast privilegecontinuously, providing a living map of entitlements so compliance is an ongoing state rather than a quarterly exercise.
2. Digital Operational Resilience Testing (Article 26, TLPT)
Article 26 mandates threat-led penetration testing (TLPT) covering both internal systems and ICT third-party providers. Elimity provides a unified map of entitlements spanning internal and external identities, enabling red teams to trace realistic privilege escalation paths and validate that access controls are genuinely effective, meeting the full scope required by Article 26 without relying on disconnected IAM domains.
3. Incident Management & Reporting (Article 17)
Article 17 requires continuous monitoring for anomalous activity, immutable audit trails, and rapid incident classification. Elimity continuously ingests and correlates identity data across the entire stack, so when an incident occurs, security teams immediately see which identities had access to affected systems, with full auditability and evidence trails built for auditors and regulators, meeting DORA’s reporting requirements with speed and confidence.
4. Third-Party Risk Management (Article 28)
Article 28 demands continuous oversight of ICT third-party supply chains with clear risk management and exit strategies. Elimity discovers and governs all third-party identities, including human accounts, service principals, API keys, and machine identities across cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments, surfacing over-privileged access, enabling automated reviews, and ensuring external vendor permissions remain proportionate at all times.
5. Information Sharing (Article 45)
Article 45 encourages financial institutions to voluntarily share actionable threat intelligence, including indicators of compromise and tactics, techniques, and procedures. Elimity’s analytics and risk reports are designed to be shared with auditors, peer institutions, and regulators alike, with standardised access risk queries enabling consistent detection of identity misconfigurations across the financial sector and accelerating collaborative threat response.
Up and Running in Weeks, Not Months
Elimity does not require you to replace your existing IGA, PAM, or CIAM tools. It connects to them, consolidates their data, and surfaces the cross-tool insights none of them can provide alone.
Implementation is measured in weeks, not months, and within weeks of deployment, access reviews, anomaly detection, and compliance reporting become automated rather than manual. If your organisation needs to demonstrate DORA readiness now, Elimity is the fastest path to continuous identity visibility across your entire environment.
