DORA Regulation and Why You Should Invest in Email Encryption

Financial services firms – as you prepare to comply with the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA regulation) in early 2025, here’s why it’s worth making email encryption part of your preparatory roadmap.

What is Email Encryption?

End-to-end email encryption is a method for protecting sensitive data as it’s sent, received, and read. Once an email is encrypted, it can only be decrypted by those with the correct decryption key. Until then, the email remains unreadable and confidential – its contents ‘scrambled’.

How Can Financial Services Benefit From Email Encryption?

With DORA regulation requiring firms to mitigate the risk of ICT-related incidents, and cyber attacks being the most cited source of risk to the UK financial system, increasing your digital data protection measures is key.

Here are three ways that email encryption can help:

1. Protect Sensitive Data

Financial services firms handle large volumes of sensitive data, from customers’ account numbers to transaction details. Email encryption can help to protect personally identifiable information (PII) and Internet Protocol (IP) data from falling into the wrong hands and being exploited.

Effective email encryption should protect emails when they’re in transit, or when they’re ‘at rest’. It should also prevent anyone other than the intended recipient from reading them.

2. Comply with DORA Regulations

One of the core pillars of DORA regulation is ICT risk management and governance. Encryption can help you remain compliant by making sure that even if your emails are intercepted, cyber attackers won’t be able to understand their contents.

Another core pillar of DORA regulation is third-party risk management. Firms will be expected to assess and mitigate the risks associated with their third-party ICT service providers, including their data protection measures. With end-to-end email encryption, you can make sure that only authorised recipients can access the data you’ve shared.

3. Stay legally Sound

Alongside DORA regulation, financial institutions in the UK are also required to comply with legislation like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), both of which aim to protect customer data.

With email encryption, you can prevent data breaches, reduce the risk of non-compliance penalties, and strengthen customers’ trust in your firm. Email encryption is particularly important for PCI DSS compliance, but it’s also strongly recommended for GDPR.

Kiteworks for DORA Compliance

With a growing regulatory landscape for financial services firms, investing in protective measures is not only recommended, but necessary. We aim to make this as straightforward as possible with our Private Content Network, designed to help UK financial services comply with DORA regulation, GDPR, PCI DSS, and IT security measures mandated by the FCA.

When it comes to researching your options, Kiteworks stands above other solutions like Microsoft Purview. With Kiteworks, you’ll have:

• A single cloud for your datasets
• Complete control over which users can access or forward content
• The confidence that we’ll never access your data
• The ability to send files up to 16 terabytes in size, so your employees won’t be tempted to use unsecure methods to send large emails
• And much more

To learn more about the Kiteworks Private Content Network and its email encryption capabilities, click here to schedule a custom demo.

Additional Resources

• Brief Navigating DORA Compliance With Kiteworks
• Webinar Assessing the Maturity of Digital Communications Privacy and Compliance in Financial Services and FinTech
• Brief Ensuring Compliance and Managing Risk in Financial Services Content Communications
• Brief Kiteworks and FCA Compliance Secure Customer Data and Streamline Operational Risk Management
• Guide The Financial Services Solution Guide to DORA Regulation UK