What is DORA?
Digital Operational Resilience Act
EU regulation requiring financial entities to implement comprehensive ICT risk management, incident reporting, digital operational resilience testing, and third-party risk management.
DORA became applicable in January 2025 and applies to virtually all EU-regulated financial entities: banks, insurance companies, investment firms, crypto-asset service providers, and critically, their ICT third-party service providers (including cloud and SASE vendors). Unlike NIS2 which is a directive requiring national transposition, DORA is a regulation — directly applicable across all EU member states.
DORA's five pillars map to SASE capabilities: ICT risk management (SASE provides unified policy enforcement and continuous posture assessment), ICT-related incident management (SASE logging, automated detection, and response workflows), digital operational resilience testing (DEM synthetic monitoring and penetration testing support), ICT third-party risk management (CASB for SaaS supply chain visibility), and information sharing (SASE threat intelligence feeds).
For SASE vendors, DORA creates a new compliance obligation. If your SASE provider serves EU financial institutions, they are classified as a 'critical ICT third-party service provider' subject to direct oversight by European Supervisory Authorities. Ask your vendor about their DORA compliance status, their incident notification SLAs (DORA requires reporting within 4 hours of classification), and their resilience testing results.
EU directive expanding cybersecurity requirements to more sectors and imposing stricter incident reporting, risk management, and supply chain security obligations with personal liability for management.
A cloud-delivered architecture that converges SD-WAN and security services (SWG, CASB, ZTNA, FWaaS) into a single, globally distributed platform.
A security control point between users and SaaS applications that provides visibility into shadow IT, enforces data protection policies, and detects threats across cloud services.
A monitoring capability that measures end-to-end application performance from the user's perspective, identifying degradation across endpoint, network, and application layers.
Insurance policies that cover financial losses from cyber incidents, increasingly requiring specific security controls like ZTNA, MFA, and endpoint detection as prerequisites for coverage.
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