How High-Quality Fibre Connectivity Can Reduce Operational Risk In Financial Services

Ireland’s financial services sector is entering a new phase of regulatory scrutiny under the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). Since coming into force in January 2025, the regulation has made digital resilience a legal requirement for banks, insurers, payment providers and investment firms operating across the EU. At its core, DORA recognises a simple reality: financial stability now depends on the strength of the technology infrastructure supporting everyday operations.

For financial organisations, compliance is no longer about policies or reporting frameworks. It is about ensuring the systems that underpin payments, trading platforms, customer services and internal operations can continue functioning during disruption. That places connectivity firmly on the agenda for leadership teams.

Modern financial services are built on continuous access to cloud platforms, data centres, real-time analytics tools and third-party ICT providers. Whether supporting transaction processing, regulatory reporting or hybrid workforces, these services rely on stable, high-capacity connections. Full fibre broadband provides the reliability and performance required to support these environments in ways legacy copper networks cannot.

DORA specifically strengthens requirements around ICT risk management and third-party dependencies. Many firms now rely on external providers for critical services, from hosted infrastructure to cybersecurity platforms and payment technologies. If connectivity between a firm and its providers is constrained or unstable, resilience planning becomes significantly more difficult. Fibre connectivity helps ensure consistent performance across these interconnected systems and reduces the risk of disruption at a local operational level.

The regulation also introduces more rigorous expectations around incident detection, response and recovery. Financial institutions must demonstrate they can continue operating through outages and cyber events and restore services quickly if disruption occurs. This requires infrastructure that supports rapid failover, secure remote access and uninterrupted communication between teams and systems. Fibre networks are designed to deliver the stability and scalability needed to meet these expectations.

Events such as the global CrowdStrike outage in 2024 highlighted how quickly ICT failures can ripple across financial systems. In a sector where downtime can affect markets, customers and counterparties simultaneously, connectivity resilience is no longer a background consideration. It is part of operational risk management.

As financial institutions continue strengthening their operational resilience frameworks, connectivity should be recognised as a core part of compliance readiness rather than a background technical consideration. Full fibre connectivity provides the reliability, scalability and performance needed to support these requirements, helping organisations reduce risk exposure and maintain continuity. For financial businesses operating in Ireland, ensuring access to high-quality fibre infrastructure is a practical step toward supporting resilient, compliant and future-ready operations.

SIRO has responded to the growing connectivity and resilience requirements facing financial services organisations by offering affordable enterprise-class fibre connectivity solutions delivered over its 100% fibre network. SIRO’s enterprise FTTP services provide dedicated symmetrical fibre connections, meaning upload and download speeds are equal, supporting faster cloud backups, secure access to cloud-based platforms, seamless video conferencing through platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and the reliable movement of data between offices, remote teams and third-party ICT providers.

Designed to support operational resilience and business continuity, SIRO’s enterprise fibre services are backed by a robust seven-day enterprise-class service level agreement (SLA) and are delivered across the ESB infrastructure, providing a fully diverse network presence. Businesses can choose from symmetrical speeds ranging from 100Mb/s to 5Gb/s, with the ability to upgrade remotely as operational requirements evolve. SIRO also offers LightPulse, a full fibre product tailored for SMEs, providing 1 Gigabit download speeds and boosted 250 Megabit upload speeds alongside a service level agreement designed to support continuity of service.

 

To learn more about broadband, visit www.SIRO.ie and search your Eircode today to find out if SIRO is available for your business.