What is DORA? A simple guide to the EU’s new Digital Operational Resilience Law

The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is reshaping how financial-sector organisations manage cyber risk, third-party providers and operational resilience. The EU regulation entered into force on 16 January 2023 and after a standard two-year period preparation period, DORA became applicable on 17 January 2025. From this date, all financial entities, including banks, insurers, fintechs and ICT suppliers supporting them, must be able to demonstrate compliance to supervisors.

What does DORA actually require, and what does it mean for the organisations that face enterprise-level obligations but often with far fewer resources?

Here is a clear, simple guide to who is affected, and what is needed to comply.

What is DORA?

DORA is an EU regulation designed to ensure the financial sector can withstand, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks and operational disruptions. It goes beyond previous rules that focused mainly on reporting and governance, introducing mandatory requirements in five key areas:

• ICT risk management
• Incident reporting
• Testing
• Third-party provider oversight
• Information sharing

If you process financial data, support financial clients or fall within DORA’s broad definition of an ICT service provider, it is likely that the regulation applies to you.

Who must comply with DORA?

DORA applies to a wide range of financial entities and their critical ICT providers, including:

• Banks and credit institutions
• Insurance and reinsurance firms
• Investment firms
• Payment and e-money institutions
• Crypto-asset service providers
• Reporting firms and trading venues
• Critical ICT third-party service providers such as cloud providers, SaaS vendors and other technology suppliers

If you support the operations of a financial entity, DORA may require your organisation to meet strict governance, documentation, and operational resilience standards.

Why is DORA needed?

Financial services are deeply interconnected. A single incident, whether a system outage or a cyberattack, can quickly spread across borders and industries.

Recent supply-chain attacks have highlighted just how vulnerable organisations are to weaknesses in their ICT ecosystem. DORA was introduced as part of the EU’s Digital Finance Package to strengthen the resilience of financial institutions and their suppliers. DORA aims to create consistency across the sector and raise the overall level of resilience.

The five core pillars of DORA

1. ICT risk management

DORA requires organisations to maintain documented, structured and regularly tested ICT risk management processes. These include:

• ICT governance and responsibilities
• Risk assessments
• Preventive and detective security measures
• Backup and disaster recovery
• Incident management processes

2. Incident reporting

Financial entities must follow clear rules for classifying, documenting and reporting significant ICT-related incidents. They must be identified promptly, categorised and reported within strict timelines. This makes reliable workflows and good documentation essential.

3. Digital operational resilience testing

Financial entities must test the effectiveness of their controls on a regular basis. This ranges from basic assessments to advanced threat-led penetration testing, depending on the organisation’s size and risk profile.

4. Third-party risk management

You must:

• Identify all ICT suppliers
• Assess and classify risks
• Monitor performance and compliance
• Ensure contractual alignment with DORA
• Prepare contingency and exit strategies

Smaller organisations often struggle with this due to limited resources and scattered documentation, which is exactly the challenge Trustlinks is designed to solve.

5. Information sharing

DORA encourages entities to share cyber-threat information with peers and communities to help strengthen collective resilience.

What are the risks of non-compliance?

Non-compliance can lead to:

• Fines and regulatory sanctions
• Increased supervisory scrutiny
• Contractual restrictions from financial sector clients
• Reputational harm
• Operational disruption during incidents

Many organisations already face pressures such as management accountability, tight reporting timelines, limited internal capability and complex regulatory requirements. DORA adds another layer of responsibility that requires clear structure and planning.

How Trustlinks helps you get ready for DORA

For many organisations, especially smaller ones, the new requirements add to existing challenges such as rapidly expanding regulations, overlapping requirements, escalating cyber threats, limited internal capacity and fragmented, hard-to-manage documentation.

Trustlinks is designed for these organisations to help them focus on clarity and structure without the complexity or cost of traditional enterprise tools.With Trustlinks, you gain:

✔ Clarity

DORA requirements mapped into simple, guided actions, controls, and tasks that are easy to follow.

✔ Control

A single workspace for risks, controls, suppliers, documents, tasks, and audit evidence.

✔ Confidence

Audit-ready processes supported by automated checks, templates and progress tracking.

✔ Built-in tools that support DORA compliance:

• Risk assessment workflows
• Supplier assessments and monitoring
• Automated readiness assessments
• Centralised policy management
• Task lists and reminders for deadlines and reviews
• Document versioning and templated policies

Trustlinks is built for organisations with limited time and resources, yet facing the same regulatory expectations as large enterprises. Compliance does not need to be overwhelming. With the right structure, guidance and tools, any organisation can achieve strong governance, reduced risk, improved resilience and confidence during audits.

Trustlinks gives you the clarity and control to make DORA compliance manageable and sustainable. You can read more about how to get ready for DORA here.

Explore the Trustlinks compliance platform here!