What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on Art.7 ICT systems, protocols and tools?

ICT system inventory recording version, support status and owner for each system; Capacity planning records and peak-load test results, including for newly introduced technology; Stress or failover test results showing systems hold up under adverse market conditions; Proportionality rationale linking system sizing to the scale of operations.

What is the most common gap auditors find on Art.7?

Unsupported or unpatched systems kept in service with no resilience assessment

DORA (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554) · DORA Chapter II: ICT Risk Management

`Art.7` ICT systems, protocols and tools

To manage ICT risk, financial entities run current ICT systems, protocols and tools that fit the size of the operations they support (scaled under the proportionality principle of Article 4), are reliable, have enough capacity to process data and absorb peak order, message or transaction volumes, including when new technology is introduced, and stay resilient when processing demand rises under stressed market conditions. Entities listed in Article 16(1) are outside this Article and follow the simplified framework of Article 16 instead.

Source: DORA (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554), Art.7. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open DORA (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554) in the compliance library.

Applies to the financial entities listed in Article 2. Many duties are lighter or absent for microenterprises and for the entities in Article 16(1); each statement says where. Article 19 carries the reporting clocks of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/301, Article 5.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

moderate

to go live

Source control / CI pipeline

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

Capacity planning records and peak-load test results, including for newly introduced technology · Source control / CI pipeline

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Stress or failover test results showing systems hold up under adverse market conditions · Backup / DR tooling

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

ICT system inventory recording version, support status and owner for each system · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Proportionality rationale linking system sizing to the scale of operations · Document repository

First move

Start with the 1 of 4 artefacts that already live in a system (Source control / CI pipeline); keep the periodic reviews but log each one as a dated record with a named reviewer.

Common gaps auditors find

Unsupported or unpatched systems kept in service with no resilience assessment
Capacity never tested against peak transaction or message volumes
No capacity review when new technology goes live

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

Art.6 ICT risk management framework · Art.8 Identification