A few weeks ago, I shared my thoughts on why business continuity must be built by design. Today, I want to turn to a subject that is inseparable from continuity—and just as critical to resilience: compliance. Because while regulations are inevitable, disruption is not.

The New Compliance Baseline

As new national and European laws come into effect, compliance has become inseparable from resilience. It’s no longer enough to prevent incidents—you’re audited on how you respond, how fast you recover, and how well you can prove compliance to regulators, customers, and stakeholders. In Europe, frameworks like NIS2, GDPR, and DORA have reset the bar. They don’t just ask “Are your systems secure?”—they demand evidence that resilience is built into operations. And the requirements are high: NIS2 requires critical incident reporting within 24 hours, and GDPR breach notifications are due within 72 hours. Missing these deadlines doesn’t just mean penalties (GDPR fines can reach 4% of global revenue) —it signals operational weakness and erodes trust.

Where Compliance Breaks Down

Despite this urgency, many organizations still struggle to meet compliance consistently. In practice, failures usually come down to complexity: regulations evolve faster than systems adapt, documentation lags behind reality, backups exist but recovery under pressure is unproven, and logs or access controls fall short of evidentiary standards. When these cracks appear, organizations quickly discover they cannot prove to regulators that their data is protected, recoverable, and traceable. And that gap is where the problem lies.

The current and foreseen regulatory landscape only amplifies this pressure. NIS2 expands requirements across essential and digital services with strict recovery and reporting expectations. GDPR remains a global benchmark, demanding “data protection by design,” strong access controls, and rapid recovery. DORA raises the stakes in financial services— not just requiring resilience testing but also oversight of third-party ICT providers. While these frameworks differ in scope, they overlap in spirit. At their core, compliance rests not only on resilience but also on the ability to demonstrate it.

Storing data is easy; proving you can restore it quickly and verifiably under audit conditions is the challenge. This is where principles like 3-2-1-1-0 matter—not because regulators love acronyms, but because they enforce discipline: redundancy, immutability, off-site copies, and automated validation. In my experience, organizations that invest in continuous verification are the ones that avoid nasty surprises when regulators or auditors come knocking. And auditors today don’t just ask if systems are secure—they expect proof. Not after-the-fact reports, but evidence generated as part of daily operations. That means tamper-evident logs, immutable retention, automated recovery reports, and role-based access controls that can stand up in a forensic review. In practice, this requires IT, Security, and Compliance to work from a shared playbook, not separate silos. The organizations that succeed are those that bake auditability into everything, not scramble to generate reports at inspection time.

Still, hidden barriers remain. Siloed systems leave blind spots, manual processes delay reporting, recovery tests are skipped or incomplete, and vendor dependencies introduce unmanaged risk. These gaps often stay invisible until an audit or breach exposes them—by then, it’s too late. Leaders who underestimate this complexity often only realize the gaps during their first cross-platform recovery test and fail to plan not only for today’s systems, but also for the way environments will evolve tomorrow.

A Quick Test for Your Team

Here are a few questions we use to help leaders gauge their compliance readiness:

• Are your backups both immutable and air-gapped?
• Do you perform restore testing with automated audit logs?
• Can you prove who accessed what data, and when?
• If you are a financial institution, do your ICT vendors meet DORA-level resilience requirements?
• Are your recovery reports audit-ready for the different regulations?

If any of these raise hesitation, it’s a signal that your compliance posture may be more fragile than it looks.

Too often, compliance is seen as a burden. I see it differently. Done right, compliance builds resilience, earns customer trust, and sets you apart in competitive markets. At Fsas Technologies, we help organizations embed compliance into their resilience strategies—not as an afterthought, but as a design principle. That means aligning with European laws, extending resilience across hybrid environments, and building frameworks that evolve with the regulatory landscape. In the end, compliance isn’t just about avoiding fines. It’s about building a foundation of trust—for customers, partners, regulators, and ultimately, for long-term competitiveness. Regulations may be inevitable. But making resilience a liability? That’s a choice.

Build resilience that regulators trust. Let’s start the conversation today: talk to our Team.