The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554) establishes a set of compliance requirements for financial institutions to ensure operational resilience. Applicable to entities operating within the European Union, the deadline for compliance is January 17, 2025. Similar to GDPR, it is expected that DORA compliance standards will influence regulations in other geographies and industries, making it a key consideration for organizations worldwide.

The Role of Multi-Cloud Strategies in DORA Compliance

A critical component of DORA compliance is operational resilience and disaster recovery testing. The regulation identifies a common vulnerability in many resiliency strategies—overreliance on a single cloud provider. Many disaster recovery (DR) plans depend on the same cloud provider for both production operations and disaster recovery sites, increasing systemic risks.

Although DORA does not mandate a cross-cloud DR site, it is inferred, as it strongly recommends evaluating increased risks associated with a single or limited set of providers. Entities must ensure that their systems can recover from outages—especially those impacting critical cloud providers. Additionally, DORA compliance requirements highlight the need to mitigate vendor lock-in, another risk associated with overreliance on a single vendor. This suggests that organizations should adopt cloud-agnostic disaster recovery solutions and technologies to maintain business continuity in the event of an outage. 

Why Multi-Cloud Strategies Align with DORA Compliance

The multi-cloud strategy for resilience is a natural extension of well-established Disaster Recovery principles. A fundamental principle of disaster recovery (DR) is ensuring that the DR site is geographically distant from the production site to mitigate risks from natural disasters or regional disruptions. While cloud computing is generally secure and reliable, individual cloud providers still experience rolling outages. To address these risks, enterprises are increasingly leveraging multi-cloud environments. Learn more about the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy in this article by RackWare.

How Enterprises Are Implementing Multi-Cloud Strategies

Most enterprises have already adopted a multi-cloud approach in their cloud maturity cycle. While businesses are unlikely to rely on five or six cloud providers, many have strategically selected two or three providers to optimize production operations and disaster recovery.

For both DORA compliance and general disaster recovery best practices, organizations should consider:

- Disaster recovery sites in different geographic regions to reduce localized risks.

- Cross-cloud disaster recovery to avoid overreliance on a single provider.

- Cloud-agnostic technologies that function seamlessly across multiple providers, eliminating vendor lock-in risks.

Best Practices for Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery

Organizations can implement multi-cloud DR strategies in different ways:

1. Single-Cloud Production, Multi-Cloud DR – Maintain production operations in one primary cloud provider while keeping disaster recovery environments in another provider.

2. Multi-Cloud Production and DR – Distribute workloads across multiple clouds and configure reciprocal DR environments, ensuring failover capabilities.

3. On-prem Production, Multi-Cloud DR – Protect production workloads running on-premises with DR sites in the cloud, using an architecture that facilitates easy migration to a cross-cloud DR setup.

The Future of DORA Compliance and Cloud Resilience

Given the increasing emphasis on operational resilience across industries, multi-cloud disaster recovery is no longer optional—it is an essential strategy for compliance, risk management, and business continuity. While DORA compliance standards do not explicitly mandate cross-cloud disaster recovery, they strongly imply it. Other regulatory frameworks are likely to follow suit, eventually requiring enterprises to adopt cloud-agnostic disaster recovery strategies to meet future compliance standards.

For official EU DORA documentation, visit the European Union's regulatory page.

Achieve DORA Compliance with RackWare

As Enterprises navigate DORA compliance requirements, it is crucial to implement cloud-agnostic disaster recovery and multi-cloud solutions. Additionally, a cloud-agnostic approach facilitates easy migration to other clouds, avoiding vendor lock-in.  RackWare specializes in disaster recovery, cloud migration, and assessment of workloads and environments for workload mobility, enabling organizations to build resilient, compliant, and vendor-agnostic infrastructures. Contact RackWare today to explore scalable, flexible, and automated solutions for DORA compliance and cloud resilience.