DORA and NIS2 Compliance Gap: Why Microsoft 365 Native Tools Fall Short
The clock is ticking. For businesses operating across the European Union, a new era of digital security is not just coming—it’s here. Indeed, it’s an era defined by two landmark legislative frameworks: the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the NIS2 Directive. These are more than just regulatory updates; rather, they represent a fundamental, non-negotiable shift in how organisations must manage their digital infrastructure, protect their data, and, most critically, ensure their operational resilience. The stakes are higher than ever, consequently, with significant penalties for non-compliance and a heightened risk of reputational damage in the event of a breach.
For countless organisations, the complexity of these regulations is compounded by their reliance on a single, powerful platform: Microsoft 365. This suite of applications serves as the central nervous system for daily operations, from communication to data storage. So, the question that is keeping security leaders, IT managers, and compliance officers up at night is not if they need to be compliant, but rather, is their Microsoft 365 environment truly ready to meet the stringent demands of DORA and NIS2?
The Illusion of Security: Why Native Tools Aren’t Enough
Many organisations take comfort in the robust security features that Microsoft provides out of the box. And for good reason—Microsoft invests billions into security, for example, offering tools like Defender and Purview that provide a strong first line of defence. However, this is where a critical blind spot lies. While these tools excel at broad threat detection and basic policy enforcement, they were not designed to provide a comprehensive, continuous, and verifiable compliance framework for the specific requirements of DORA or NIS2.
The key to understanding this gap lies in the difference between security and compliance. A system can be technically secure from many external threats, yet still fail to meet the reporting, auditing, and resilience standards of a regulatory body. The reality is that a significant percentage of all cyber breaches—often over 80%—originate not from a sophisticated external hack, but from simple internal weaknesses.
We’re talking about a trifecta of hidden risks that Microsoft’s native tools struggle to fully address:
- System Misconfigurations: Simple, often-overlooked settings within the Microsoft 365 admin panel can create a backdoor for attackers. These aren’t malicious flaws; they are the result of human error, a rush to deployment, or a lack of continuous oversight. Without a dedicated solution to monitor for and automatically correct these misconfigurations, you are left with a system that is fundamentally insecure by design, no matter how strong your firewall is.
- Identity Vulnerabilities: Weak authentication protocols, overly permissive access rights, and orphaned user accounts are a goldmine for cybercriminals. DORA and NIS2 place a heavy emphasis on identity-based security. Relying on manual audits to spot and correct these vulnerabilities is like trying to catch a river of data with a bucket. You need a system that can provide real-time, automated checks to ensure every user’s access is strictly controlled and continuously validated.
- Policy Drift: In a dynamic environment like Microsoft 365, security policies can degrade over time. New applications are added, user roles change, and permissions are granted on an ad-hoc basis, causing your system to drift away from its initial, secure configuration. This slow, subtle process creates a system that is no longer compliant with its own security policy, let alone a regulatory framework like DORA or NIS2. This drift is the silent killer of compliance and a common entry point for sophisticated attacks.
Beyond the Basics: A New Approach to Resilience
The solution isn’t to abandon Microsoft 365; that would be both impractical and inefficient. The answer is to augment it with a purpose-built platform that fills these critical compliance gaps. DORA and NIS2 require a platform that can provide continuous, automated, and verifiable proof of resilience.
This approach is built on four fundamental pillars:
- Assess: You cannot protect what you cannot see. The first step is to get a real-time, comprehensive view of your entire Microsoft 365 security posture. This goes beyond a simple scan. It involves a deep, agentless assessment that connects via API to your environment to check every setting, every policy, and every user account against established compliance benchmarks like CIS or NIST. It’s a snapshot of your digital health, delivered in minutes, not days.
- Harden: Once you know where your vulnerabilities are, you need to fix them. Manual remediation is time-consuming and prone to error. An effective solution automates the hardening process, automatically enforcing policies and correcting misconfigurations to eliminate common attack vectors. This proactive approach saves your IT team countless hours and ensures your system is always aligned with best practices.
- Monitor: Threats are not static. Your security posture shouldn’t be either. You need a system that provides real-time, AI-driven monitoring to detect anomalies and flag potential threats instantly. This includes everything from unusual login times and locations to suspicious file sharing activity. This 24/7 vigilance is a key component of the operational resilience demanded by DORA and NIS2.
- Respond: When a threat hits, speed is everything. DORA and NIS2 both emphasise the need for rapid incident response to minimise damage. A truly resilient system doesn’t just send an alert; it takes automated action to neutralise a threat. This could mean locking an account, isolating a device, or revoking access rights the moment it detects an anomaly. This speed is a game-changer, helping you limit the blast radius of an attack and meet the strict incident reporting timelines of the new regulations.
Join Elasticito to Get the Answers You Need
Navigating these new regulations doesn’t have to be a guessing game. In short it’s time to move past fragmented solutions and manual audits. To help you get a clear, actionable roadmap, Elasticito is hosting a special webinar with Overe: “Is Your Microsoft 365 DORA & NIS2 Ready? A Practical Guide to Compliance and Cyber Resilience”
This is not a traditional sales presentation. On the contrary this is a live, question-based webinar featuring key industry experts who will address your most pressing concerns directly. We’ll show you why a new, automated approach is necessary and provide a clear framework to help you achieve and maintain compliance. We will also demonstrate how this kind of platform can help you prove your resilience to auditors with verifiable data and automated reporting.
The deadline is approaching, and the stakes are too high to risk a “wait and see” approach. Ultimately, the time to prepare is now.