Compliance evidence for financial services on Azure
DORA is in force. Continuous ICT risk evidence, not annual audits.
The regulatory driver
DORA has applied to financial entities across the EU since January 2025. It requires continuous ICT risk management, a maintained register of information for third-party providers, and demonstrable operational resilience. Supervisory authorities expect evidence on request, not at year end.
For a firm running on Azure, that means proving the state of your estate continuously: encryption, logging, access control, backup and recovery posture, evidenced per subscription.
What Equalis OpsReg shows you
- ✓81 DORA rules evaluated on every scan
- ✓ICT risk controls mapped to the exact Azure resource property that satisfies them
- ✓Per-subscription evidence exports scoped for supervisory submission
- ✓Seven-year immutable retention aligned to financial record-keeping
What exposure looks like
DORA has been fully applicable since 17 January 2025. There is no transition period left to plan against.
National competent authorities enforce it directly. Supervisors can require specific remediation, restrict business activities pending compliance, and publish the identity of non-compliant firms. In EU financial markets, public naming moves faster than any fine.
Senior management carries personal accountability for ICT risk governance, and the Register of Information is the first thing supervisors cross-check.
Separately, GDPR exposure runs to 20 million euros or 4 percent of annual worldwide turnover, whichever is higher. The two regimes apply together.
Why generic tooling falls short here
Breadth over depth
Multi-cloud compliance platforms normalise to what is comparable across providers. DORA's ICT risk articles map to specific Azure resource properties, and those do not survive normalisation.
Risk scores are not evidence
Cloud security platforms rank findings by exploitability. A supervisor asks what the configuration was on a given date, attributed to a named entity. Those are different questions.
Scope has to hold
Evidence blended across subscriptions is inadmissible when the certified scope is one subscription. Every artifact here names its scope.