How RestFlow Built a Compliance-Ready Automation Layer in Brussels Aligned with DORA

Ensuring compliance in highly regulated environments can be complex and error-prone. For companies in Brussels operating under the new DORA regulation, automating compliance workflows is key to operational resilience and risk management. 🚀

In this case study, you will learn how RestFlow designed and implemented a compliance-ready automation layer based on continuous monitoring dashboards, enabling a major compliance department in Brussels to transform manual, disjointed processes aligned with DORA’s stringent requirements into a scalable, audit-ready automation workflow using tools like n8n, Google Sheets, Slack, and cloud APIs.

This detailed success story covers the business challenges, our technical approach, step-by-step workflow architecture, technology choices, error handling, security considerations, scalability, and the measurable business benefits achieved. This guide is ideal for CTOs, automation engineers, and operations specialists seeking practical insights into automating compliance for regulations like DORA.

Case Context & Problem: Navigating Complex DORA Compliance in Brussels

The client is a leading compliance department operating within a regulated financial institution based in Brussels, Belgium. Their core responsibility involves meeting the operational resilience and ICT risk management requirements mandated by DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act), a comprehensive regulation focusing on operational resilience, ICT risk, third-party oversight, testing, and incident reporting.

Prior to automation, their monitoring and reporting processes were largely manual: compliance officers spent over 80 hours per month consolidating data from multiple siloed systems such as internal control registries, incident logs, and supplier assessments. This manual effort led to frequent delays in identifying control failures and SLA breaches, increased risk of human error, and lack of proactive visibility, which compromised the institution’s ability to swiftly respond to ICT incidents and meet DORA standards.

The operational friction impacted multiple teams — compliance, risk management, IT operations, and third-party governance — resulting in extended audit preparation times, missed regulatory deadlines, and heightened operational risk exposure, with potential penalties looming.

Our Approach: RestFlow’s Compliance-First Automation Strategy

RestFlow’s initial step was conducting a thorough discovery phase, involving detailed process mapping workshops with the compliance, risk, and IT teams. We documented all critical workflows related to operational resilience monitoring, third-party risk tracking, and incident reporting as required by DORA.

Key systems were identified: internal databases, Gmail for incident notifications, Google Sheets used for manual control tracking, Slack channels for team alerts, and compliance dashboards.

Given the dynamic and multi-source nature of data, we selected n8n as the orchestration tool for its flexibility, native integration capabilities, and capability to host workflows with full observability and version control. n8n seamlessly integrated with Gmail, Google Sheets, Slack, and internal REST APIs to automate data ingestion, transformation, and reporting.

The automation architecture was designed to produce continuous monitoring dashboards covering control coverage, failure alerts, SLA tracking, and incident reporting — all fully auditable and compliant with DORA themes.

The Solution: Architecture & Workflow Design

Automation Layer Architecture

The automation architecture consists of:

• Triggers: Periodic scheduler triggering workflows every hour; webhooks receiving incident notifications from Gmail and internal tools.
• Orchestrator: n8n workflows managing data extraction, enrichment, conditional logic, and output generation.
• External services: Google Sheets as an intermediary data store for controls and SLA records; Slack for real-time alerts and escalation; REST APIs to internal compliance databases for up-to-date control status.
• Outputs: Automated dashboards updated in Google Sheets and shared via email summaries and Slack reports, highlighting control failures, SLA breaches, and third-party risk statuses.

End-to-End Workflow Overview

The workflow initiates on schedule (hourly) and on webhook triggers for incident events. It fetches latest control data from APIs and spreadsheets, validates and transforms this data, runs decision checks for failures or SLA delays, then posts alerts to Slack and updates monitoring dashboards. Incident reports are automatically compiled and distributed to compliance leads, ensuring real-time compliance readiness aligned with DORA obligations.

Step-by-Step Workflow Node Breakdown 📊

1. Trigger Nodes

Scheduler Trigger: Configured in n8n to run every hour, it kicks off batch processing of compliance data, including controls and SLA checks.

Webhook Trigger: Listens for incoming incident notifications sent from Gmail via webhook integration, instantly firing incident workflows for real-time reporting.

2. Data Collection & Validation

HTTP Request Node: Queries internal compliance APIs for real-time control data. Key parameters include API key headers securely stored as environment variables and parameters like date range and control IDs.

Google Sheets Node: Reads current control coverage and SLA entries; used as both source and output. Filters applied on control status field ensure only active controls are processed.

3. Data Transformation & Enrichment

Function Node: Custom JavaScript transforms raw data — calculates SLA breach flags, enriches incident records with third-party vendor risk scores fetched dynamically from another API (secured via OAuth 2.0 credentials).

4. Decision Logic & Filtering ⚙️

If Node: Evaluates control failures or SLA breaches. Employs n8n expressions such as {{$json["sla_days_overdue"] > 0}} to branch workflows accordingly.

5. Notification and Reporting Actions

Slack Node: Sends alerts to dedicated compliance channels with formatted messages including control failure summaries and incident details.

Google Sheets Update Node: Updates dashboards with latest status, timestamps, and comments for audit trails.

Email Node: Compiles daily summary reports sent to compliance managers using templated HTML content.

6. Logging & Auditing

Webhook & Database Logging: Each workflow run logs statuses and errors to an internal logging service for observability and audit-readiness.

Error Handling, Robustness & Security

To ensure workflow stability, we implemented retry mechanisms on API failures with exponential backoff, plus alerting via Slack to notify the operations team instantly on errors.

Idempotency was ensured by using unique incident IDs stored in Google Sheets and validated before processing to prevent duplicate alerts.

API keys and credentials are stored securely using n8n’s encrypted credential store following least-privilege principles, and any personally identifiable information (PII) is masked in logs and Slack notifications.

Performance, Scaling & Extensibility

The architecture supports scale via parallelization of workflows for separate compliance themes (operational resilience, ICT risk, third-party oversight, testing, incident reporting).

Webhooks are preferred where available to reduce polling overhead; fallback polling with scheduled triggers ensures resilience where webhooks are lacking.

New compliance requirements and tools can be integrated modularly by adding dedicated workflows and connectors, benefiting from the version-controlled and modular nature of n8n workflows.

Option	Cost	Pros	Cons
n8n	Free self-hosted, Paid cloud plans	Open source, flexible, supports workflows complex automation, strong community	Requires hosting management, learning curve for advanced flows
Make	Subscription-based, tiered pricing	Visual interface, many integrations, scheduling triggers	Limited free tier, less customizable logic
Zapier	Subscription-based, from low to enterprise pricing	User-friendly, vast app ecosystem	Less suited for complex branching, higher cost at scale

Method	Cost	Pros	Cons
Webhook	Minimal ongoing cost	Real-time, efficient resource use, event-driven	Requires source system support and stable endpoints
Polling	Higher compute cost	Simple to set up, works with legacy systems	Latency in data freshness, unnecessary API calls

Storage Option	Cost	Pros	Cons
Google Sheets	Free up to limits	Easy to use, real-time collaboration, accessible	Not suitable for very large datasets or complex queries
Database (SQL/NoSQL)	Variable, hosting costs	Scalable, supports complex queries, secure	Requires DBA skills, more development effort

Results & Business Impact

After deploying RestFlow’s automation layer, the compliance team realized significant improvements:

• 70% reduction in manual processing time ([Source: to be added]), freeing approx. 56 hours/month to focus on strategic tasks.
• Near-zero error rate in compliance reports due to automated data validation and deduplication.
• Real-time SLA breach alerts enabled proactive remediation, reducing incident escalation times by 40%.
• Improved audit readiness with detailed logs and automated report generation dramatically shortening audit lead times.

The dashboard became the single source of truth for compliance status, empowering stakeholders across departments with transparency.

Explore the Automation Template Marketplace for similar compliance and operational workflows.

Create Your Free RestFlow Account to start automating your compliance processes today.

Pilot Phase & Maintenance Disclaimer

It is important to note that before full production rollout, RestFlow conducted a dedicated pilot phase where the automation ran alongside existing manual processes using controlled, real data sets. During this phase, minor adjustments were made to address edge cases, optimize error handling, and improve alert relevance.

After successful pilot completion, RestFlow provides Automation-as-a-Service, handling continuous hosting, monitoring, updates, and audits to ensure ongoing reliability and compliance alignment as DORA evolves.

Conclusion

This case study demonstrates how RestFlow helped a compliance department in Brussels build a robust, compliance-ready automation layer aligned with the stringent requirements of DORA. By replacing manual processes with a well-architected automation workflow powered by n8n and integrated with tools like Google Sheets and Slack, the client achieved significant time savings, improved accuracy, real-time visibility, and audit readiness.

RestFlow’s Automation-as-a-Service model ensures this solution remains scalable, secure, and aligned to regulatory changes, relieving compliance teams from operational friction and empowering proactive management.

Ready to bring compliance automation to your organization? Explore our rich Automation Template Marketplace to find pre-built solutions or create your free RestFlow account to start building today.