Struggling with DORA Compliance? Network Orchestration Can Make the Difference for E.U. Financial Institutions

As of January 17th this year, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is in effect for financial institutions and third-party ICT partners operating in the EU.

The DORA rules aren’t just a compliance checkbox — they’re a mandate to rethink operational resilience in an era of rising cyber threats and complex networks. Failing to comply risks heavy penalties and, more critically, exposure to operational disruptions that can erode customer trust and financial stability.

As 2025 has picked up, many organizations are finding DORA compliance difficult to balance with priorities like network efficiency and service delivery speed. The regulation allows for a longer implementation period for companies with large, complex networks — but with deadlines approaching, if you need to adapt your approach, the time is now.

At Itential, we’ve spent years helping organizations navigate network complexity of all kinds, from compliance challenges to multi-vendor integration. DORA is no exception. Here’s how we’re turning compliance challenges into opportunities for transformation.

DORA is designed to bolster the operational resilience of financial institutions against ICT-related disruptions.

The new regulations come as a response to a hard truth: today’s financial networks — sprawling, multi-vendor, and often stitched together through years of mergers and legacy systems — are prime targets for cyberattacks and operational failures.

DORA zeroes in on network security, segmentation of critical functions, rapid incident response, and tighter, more defined incident reporting requirements. The regulation outlines new requirements for ICT (information and communications technology) incident reporting and response, stricter guidelines on testing and data security, and a headline requirement: companies must identify CIFs (critical and important functions) and implement network segmentation to minimize disruption if one function is interrupted.

To brush up on the requirements, see this helpful DORA Hub from our partner HighPoint.

The new regulations are pushing firms to rethink how they manage risk and infrastructure.

The stakes are high. Modern financial networks are a maze of domains, vendors, and tools, making compliance a daunting task without the right technology. That’s where Itential steps in. Our integration and orchestration platform simplifies the complexity and allows teams to manage configurations and deliver services across complex, segmented networks from a single platform, ensuring financial institutions meet DORA’s requirements efficiently and reliably.

DORA’s requirements when taken in full view can start to build a blueprint for resilient financial networks. Let’s unpack the key network-related demands and the challenges they present:

• Risk Management & Operational Resilience: Firms must prevent, detect, and recover from ICT disruptions. This means segmenting networks, automating remediation, and maintaining detailed compliance records — tasks that strain manual processes in multi-vendor environments.
• Incident Management & Reporting: Major incidents need to be detected, logged, and reported fast. Real-time monitoring and automated workflows are no longer optional.
• Network Segmentation for Critical Functions: Isolating CIFs into distinct network “buckets” reduces the blast radius of breaches. But segmentation can slow down network operations unless teams have the right platforms and practices in place.
• Infrastructure Agility & Visibility: As firms adopt new security tools or upgrade infrastructure, they must integrate them seamlessly while keeping a clear view of network health and compliance status — a tall order in fragmented systems.

DORA compliance isn’t just about meeting regulatory requirements — it’s about transforming financial networks to be more resilient, efficient, and secure. Let’s dive into how Itential can help your organization do just that.

At its core, Itential is an orchestration hub that ties together the disparate pieces of a financial network — security platforms, monitoring tools, and multi-vendor infrastructure — into a cohesive, compliant system.

I want to be clear: Itential is not a network security platform. To segment your network, detect breaches, or manage incidents, you’ll need dedicated security tools — and there’s a good chance you’ve already adopted some of these in response to DORA requirements. Yet many organizations still struggle to maintain efficiency, even after investing in these solutions, because simply deploying new security platforms doesn’t automatically translate into improved operations or regulatory compliance.

It’s about transforming the operational model. As it turns out, sticking with traditional methods to manage your network creates problems when you want to modernize.

By bringing your network into one, centralized platform where a NetDevOps team can build multi-domain workflows, integrate with everything across every network domain and segment, and ensure your network continues to support the business at the pace of business, you’re turning a costly compliance challenge into an opportunity for future-proof transformation.

Here’s how Itential’s Platform tackles DORA’s biggest challenges:

Incident Response

The Problem: When a threat emerges, financial institutions need to act instantly across all network domains, not just one vendor’s slice of the pie. In addition, organizations must have visibility to audit every piece of every network change so incident reporting can follow DORA requirements.

How Itential Helps: Teams leverage multiple security platforms for different network domains. Manually blocking an IP flagged by one platform across every domain and service can take minutes — opening you up to further disruption. Itential integrates with every security platform via API so network teams can aggregate alerts and build remediation workflows to trigger in response, turning minutes into seconds and cutting down the attack vector. Plus, Itential’s position as a central hub and our logging capabilities ensure every step of every change is accounted for.

See a Real-World Example

Network Segmentation

The Problem: DORA mandates isolating critical and important functions (CIFs) into separate network segments to shrink the blast radius of incidents. But segmentation often complicates service delivery, leaving teams struggling to maintain efficiency across a fragmented landscape.

How Itential Helps: Itential turns segmentation into a strength, not a bottleneck. Our platform orchestrates multi-domain workflows that embed compliance checks, security policies, and monitoring into every process. Teams can coordinate workflows across domains while ensuring each process only accesses data it should, interacts with systems it should, and handles errors like it should — ensuring CIFs can stay isolated without slowing down operations. By integrating with existing security and monitoring tools, we automate the enforcement of segmentation boundaries while keeping documentation airtight for DORA audits.

Federated Visibility & Compliance Reporting

The Problem: DORA demands real-time insight into network security, segmentation, and compliance — tough to achieve in a segmented, sprawling environment.

How Itential Helps: We provide a centralized view of network resources, letting teams run large-scale compliance checks or enforce golden configurations across segments. Workflows integrate with monitoring tools via APIs, automating scans and logging to meet DORA’s reporting needs. It’s visibility that scales with complexity.

Seamless Integration & Onboarding for New Infrastructure & Applications

The Problem: New network devices, security platforms, and compliance tools are inevitable, but stitching them into existing workflows is a bottleneck — especially under DORA’s scrutiny.

How Itential Helps: Whether it’s CLI-managed gear or API-driven systems, Itential eliminates integration lag. We enable multi-domain workflows that enforce compliance policies consistently, no matter the vendor. Onboarding new infrastructure? Our orchestration ensures it’s up, running, and compliant without slowing service delivery. DORA isn’t directly about device standards, but most organizations are investing in new infrastructure as a result of new requirements — making these capabilities a game-changer for agility.

DORA compliance isn’t a one-off project — it’s an ongoing transformation of how financial institutions manage their networks. Itential makes that shift manageable, acting as the orchestration hub that ties together incident response, infrastructure integration, and network visibility. By automating the heavy lifting, we help firms stay ahead of regulatory demands without sacrificing efficiency or security.

As the world continues to shift, our cybersecurity landscape only grows more complex. Malicious actors are constantly on the cutting edge, and financial institutions must adapt and evolve to keep up the fight. And even if we leave hackers and cyberattacks to one side, the truth is, human error and simple incidents are always going to create the majority of issues. The more you automate, standardize, and streamline, the more you can avoid those kinds of critical disruptions — as your network continues to grow in both size and complexity.

Want to see how Itential can streamline your DORA compliance? Request a demo or reach out to our team today. Let’s build a network that’s not just compliant, but future-proof.