Regulatory Resilience: Use to Create Your Commercial Advantage
You might well ask what EU or UK Financial Regulations have got to do with your tech stacks. After all, your team don’t wear suits to work, let alone work in the financial sector. But if you handle payment journeys, wallets, lending products, or platforms that financial firms rely on, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the FCA’s Operational Resilience rules have landed squarely on your desk.
The regulatory honeymoon period is officially over. Following the FCA’s hard enforcement deadlines and the rollout of DORA, compliance is no longer just admired; it is legally required. It now appears in standard onboarding questionnaires and directly influences who wins commercial contracts.
Even if you are a UK agency building for EU-facing clients, or a domestic FinTech processing cross-border payments, your hosting choices are now part of a strictly regulated perimeter.
The Reality Check: The 5 Pillars & Impact Tolerances
Regulators across the UK and EU are sending a unified message: Downtime is no longer an option, and if the door is kicked in, how fast can you fix it?
DORA is built on Five Key Principles:
- ICT Risk Management: Every company board needs a real ICT risk framework in place. ‘We have a good tech team’ no longer cuts it.
- Incident Reporting: Businesses must detect and classify serious ICT incidents quickly, then report them within tight regulatory timelines.
- Resilience Testing: DORA expects regular testing, from basic backups through to threat-led penetration tests and full failover drills.
- Third-Party Risk: Financial entities must map their ICT providers, assess risk, and tighten contracts across their entire supply chain.
- Information Sharing: Businesses are actively encouraged to share threat intelligence to help the sector react faster.
Similarly, the FCA requires firms to identify ‘Important Business Services’ and set strict ‘Impact Tolerances’. Firms must mathematically prove they can recover critical systems within a set timeframe during a severe disruption.
Why Digital Agencies and SMEs Must Act Right Now
If you are a digital or product agency shipping apps or trading platforms, your clients are highly visible in DORA’s headlights.
- Friction in Procurement: Your hosting architecture and provider choices will appear in your clients’ third-party risk registers. Security questionnaires will demand data location, backup testing evidence, and incident response runbooks.
- The Evidence Gap: ‘Our MSP will handle it’ only works if the MSP is actually able to prove it. Banks and FinTechs will heavily favour agencies whose stack aligns with frameworks like ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials +, with FSQS compliance; demanding solid evidence, not just enthusiasm.
- The Sovereignty Shift: Add growing worries about data sovereignty and the US CLOUD Act, and saying ‘we are in an EU region on a US hyperscaler’ will rapidly put your business on the backfoot.
The Fast-Track: Inheriting Compliance with Digital Craftsmen
Building a fortress of compliance from scratch requires massive Capex investment and internal resource strain. The smarter route is to simply plug into an existing, compliant regulator-ready framework.
At Digital Craftsmen, our Managed Cloud Services act as your ‘Compliance Engine.’ We don’t just provide server space; we provide a fully audited environment that satisfies both DORA and FCA requirements out-of-the-box.
Here is how our Cyber Security and Managed Hosting Services map directly to the regulator’s rigorous standards:
| Regulatory Requirement | What the Client Must Prove | The Digital Craftsmen Solution |
| FCA SYSC 8.1 / DORA Pillar 4 (Outsourcing & 3rd Party Risk) | Outsourcing critical functions must not impair the quality of internal control. | Accredited Frameworks: We are pre-audited. Our ISO 27001 and FSQS certifications provide the audit trail the regulator demands, proving your control over outsourced data. |
| FCA PS21/3 / DORA Pillar 1 (Operational Resilience) | Prove you can recover Important Business Services within strict ‘Impact Tolerances’. | Managed Private Cloud: We architect High Availability (HA) environments. Our Disaster Recovery processes ensure you reliably hit your Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). |
| FCA SYSC 13.9 / DORA Pillar 2 (Cyber Resilience & Reporting) | Detect cyber attacks immediately and report major incidents within 24 hours. | Managed SOC (Security Operations Centre): Our SOC monitors threats 24/7. We handle the rapid detection, containment, and intelligence sharing so you never miss a reporting window. |
| Right of Audit & Sovereignty | The firm and regulators must have effective access to data and operational oversight. | UK Sovereignty: Unlike opaque hyperscalers, our UK-sovereign status guarantees that you (and your auditors) have full transparency over your infrastructure. |
| DORA Pillar 3 (Resilience Testing) | Regular testing, from backups to Threat-Led Penetration Testing. | Penetration Testing & Audits: We design and run disaster recovery drills and vulnerability audits, producing human-readable reports for your board. |
As Andy Firth from Ascensor says regarding our proactive approach to incident detection:
“Digital Craftsmen are proactive in their approach to security. They identify and resolve potential issues before they become problems, allowing us to focus on our business with complete peace of mind.”
Three Actions to Become DORA Compliant Today
You do not need a 200-page ‘DORA transformation programme’. What you do need is clarity on three basic points:
- Map the Scope: Identify which products touch EU/UK customers, payments, or regulated data. List the Cloud platform, MSP, and critical SaaS providers behind them.
- Baseline your Resilience: Write down your RPO/RTO and when you last successfully tested a backup restore. Spot the gaps where the plan is basically ‘the Cloud Provider will sort it’.
- Classify Suppliers: Ask your critical hosts and agencies if they can provide security documentation and DR test evidence that would satisfy an EU bank.
The Digital Craftsmen Partner Programme
If you are an agency or consultancy, our Partner Programme is how you offer DORA-aligned hosting without becoming a 24/7 MSP yourself.
You get white-label or co-branded secure hosting running on our accredited platforms. We supply a named technical team and ready-made artefacts (security summaries, disaster-recovery test reports) to help you answer tough procurement questions fast. The result: you can say ‘yes’ to higher-value financial pitches while we carry the operational risk. We offer a generous commission for each client we manage on your behalf under your company banner, but without the heavy Capex or Opex investment.
Your Next Steps
DORA and FCA compliance are not just more acronyms to throw in a slide deck. They are a nudge – or a shove – towards better operational resilience and more honest supplier choices.
But you don’t have to do it alone.
Let’s discuss how our team are ready to take the weight of compliance off your shoulders and turn regulatory requirements into your competitive advantage.
Contact Digital Craftsmen today to book your Business Resilience Discovery Call
Speak with a Craftsman today, call us on 020 3745 7706 or email us here about getting on the right side of compliance.
