DORA Compliance for SaaS Platforms: Building Trust with Financial Institutions

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is reshaping how financial institutions evaluate the technology they depend on. For SaaS providers serving the financial sector, more than a compliance benchmark, this regulation can be considered a real test of reliability, maturity, and trustworthiness.

DORA embraces a realistic understanding of digital operations: disruptions will happen, systems will fail, and vulnerabilities will emerge. Resilience, therefore, cannot rely on a perspective of perfection, but must be built on preparation, governance, and continuous improvement.

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The transition to cloud-based environments amplifies this need. As financial institutions evolve from traditional on-premise infrastructures to cloud-native platforms, they must ensure that the partners they rely on—including SaaS providers—meet the same standards of control, security, and resilience they previously enforced internally.

This article outlines how a SaaS solution demonstrates alignment with DORA, showing institutions that they are prepared, secure, and capable of supporting operational resilience in the cloud era.

Cloud as a Foundation: Proving a Mature Technological Model

Cloud-native architecture is now a core expectation for scalable, secure financial technology. A SaaS platform operating natively in the cloud is able to demonstrate maturity through elastic scalability, redundant deployments, and secure-by-default configurations that evolve continuously.

Platforms such as AWS enable organizations to meet these expectations without maintaining physical infrastructure. For SaaS providers, this means the burden of resilience is shared: performance and security benefit from cloud-level capabilities while the provider maintains architectural control and operational visibility.

A DORA-ready SaaS should be able to show that its infrastructure is built for automatic scaling, supports multi-region availability, and uses secure and auditable configurations. Mirai RiskTech, for example, was designed cloud-native from inception, leveraging AWS to ensure performance, resilience, and efficiency as client activity grows.

Governance First: A New Model for Control and Oversight

Under DORA, control is no longer measured by physical servers but by governance, oversight, and transparency. Even within a shared responsibility model, operational awareness and clear accountability remain essential.

This shift requires continuous risk assessments, structured oversight of third-party providers, and well-defined responsibilities across internal teams. It also demands visibility into infrastructure, proactive monitoring of security events, and documented operational processes that provide auditable evidence.

By establishing strong governance, organizations demonstrate that control is not lost when infrastructure moves to the cloud; it is simply exercised through governance rather than hardware.

Scalability, Flexibility, and Innovation: Advantages the Cloud Brings

Cloud environments bring capabilities that naturally align with DORA’s expectations for operational resilience. Scalability allows resources to adjust automatically as demand increases, a crucial advantage for institutions operating under fluctuating or high-volume workloads. Mirai RiskTech’s architecture supports automatic horizontal scaling, ensuring that performance evolves seamlessly with each institution’s activity.

And the cloud also accelerates innovation. By offering immediate access to technologies such as AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics, SaaS platforms can deliver enhancements far more quickly than traditional infrastructures, all while maintaining strict regulatory and security standards.

Additionally, cloud-native SaaS operates on a continuous update model, which allows:

• Security patches and improvements to be deployed seamlessly
• New features to reach production without downtime
• Performance enhancements to be delivered at a steady and transparent pace

Together, these capabilities demonstrate that cloud-native SaaS solutions support DORA’s core principles:

1. Resilience by design
2. Rapid adaptation
3. And uninterrupted operational continuity

Security and Compliance: Aligning With Established Standards

To meet DORA expectations, security practices must align with recognized industry frameworks. This includes maintaining certifications such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2, adhering to cloud-provider compliance standards, and ensuring that audit trails and annual reviews are fully documented and accessible. These elements provide the evidence-based assurance that DORA requires, proving that security is structured and continuously validated.

Mirai RiskTech maintains alignment with AWS’s compliance framework, including an Addendum reflecting EBA considerations, regular third-party audits, and annual reviews covering SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications. This creates a transparent picture of security and operational maturity.

Under DORA, institutions need assurance that SaaS providers can support incident reporting, maintain effective security monitoring, and offer documented procedures for handling operational disruptions. A provider’s ability to demonstrate these capabilities signals readiness and reliability.

Managing Vendor Dependency: Exit Strategies and Preparedness

Vendor lock-in is one of DORA’s key concerns. Moving to the cloud introduces dependencies beyond an institution’s direct control, and providers must show they understand and manage these dependencies effectively.

Preparedness is central to this. DORA doesn’t require institutions or providers to operate across multiple clouds at once: it requires realistic exit strategies, tested recovery procedures, and a clear understanding of architectural dependencies.

One does not need to run in two cloud providers at the same time, but must know exactly what to do if the one they rely on becomes unavailable. Cloud-agnostic, therefore, means clarity, documentation, and operational discipline, not duplication.

By mapping dependencies, defining responsibilities, and regularly testing migration or recovery plans, a SaaS provider demonstrates that continuity can be maintained even if conditions change.

Cultural Transformation: Embedding DevSecOps and Shared Responsibility

Operating in the cloud is a cultural shift. SaaS providers must embrace a DevSecOps mindset where development, security, and operations work together in continuous cycles.

This cultural shift reflects DORA’s requirements for transparency, readiness, and cross-functional collaboration.

Resilience becomes part of day-to-day operations: automated testing, continuous monitoring, and integrated security practices ensure that resilience is built into systems from the start, not added later as a control.

By demonstrating this cultural maturity, a SaaS provider reassures institutions that it understands resilience as an organizational practice, not a feature.

Governance and Control in Distributed Cloud Environments

As cloud architectures become increasingly distributed, governance models must ensure visibility and accountability across every layer of the environment. This involves clear policies for monitoring usage, managing costs, tracking performance, and maintaining consistency across deployments.

Centralized monitoring tools, structured dashboards, and documented operational procedures provide the evidence needed to demonstrate disciplined control over distributed infrastructures.

DORA reinforces this model by requiring continuous oversight from financial institutions, and that expectation is met through structured transparency.

Building Resilience by Design: A Core Expectation Under DORA

Resilience by design is one of DORA’s fundamental principles. From access segregation to multi-region deployments and from backup automation to incident response processes, it requires SaaS providers to integrate resilience into every layer of their architecture, showing that resilience is really an architectural matter.

By documenting recovery objectives, testing continuity scenarios, and ensuring collaboration across the ecosystem, SaaS providers demonstrate the proactive mindset that DORA expects, and resilience becomes a cultural and operational capability.

Compliance Under DORA: Where Risk Management Meets Trust and Human Collaboration

Behind every regulatory effort are the people working together to protect the stability of the financial ecosystem.

Risk managers, institutions, and clients all rely on collaboration, clarity, and shared responsibility. DORA reinforces this human dimension by formalizing transparency and coordinated response across the sector.

Mirai RiskTech embraces this perspective: the contracts and operating model are designed with DORA alignment in mind from the start, taking the regulation’s requirements into account to make the compliance process simpler and more transparent for clients. Trust is built as much in communication and partnership as it is through technology. It is impossible to be completely secure, but it is possible to be prepared. DORA formalizes this mindset: identify what may fail, minimize impact, recover transparently, and maintain trust.

DORA represents maturity in digital operations, shifting the sector from static compliance to continuous resilience, from isolated controls to integrated oversight, and from risk avoidance to realistic readiness. For SaaS providers, as Mirai RiskTech, it sets the expectation to match agility with governance and innovation with trust.

Mirai RiskTech & DORA Compliance: A Visual Understanding

Turn DORA Compliance Into a Competitive Advantage

Download our Whitepaper "DORA and the Cloud-Driven Transformation: The Path Toward Digital Resilience" and discover how SaaS providers and financial institutions can build resilience, governance, and trust in cloud-first environments.

From operational maturity to vendor dependency management and cloud-native readiness, this guide gives you the clarity to evaluate partners with confidence.

👉 Download the Whitepaper and strengthen your institution’s operational resilience today.