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UltraDNS and DORA: Supporting Financial Services with Resilient, Compliant DNS

Enrique Somoza
  • Community team

How UltraDNS Helps You Stay Resilient and DORA-Ready

If you're in the financial services space in the EU, you've probably heard about the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). It's a big shift in how financial institutions manage their digital risks—and it comes with very real expectations for your entire technology stack, including DNS.

The good news is that UltraDNS is already built with operational resilience at its core, making it a natural fit for helping you stay aligned with DORA requirements.

What Is DORA?

DORA is a regulation from the European Union designed to ensure that financial institutions can withstand and recover from all types of IT-related disruptions and cyber threats. It covers everything from third-party risk to incident reporting and business continuity.

You can read the full regulation text here: Regulation (EU) 2022/2554 on digital operational resilience for the financial sector.

While DORA does not require data to be stored in a specific country, it does emphasize transparency about where data is processed and stored. Article 30 mandates that financial institutions be informed of the regions or countries where data processing and storage occur, including for ICT services like DNS. Providers like UltraDNS must be prepared to disclose this information and support customer compliance with location-awareness requirements.

Why DNS Matters for DORA

Your DNS provider is critical to digital resilience. If your DNS goes down, your customers can't access your services—even if everything else is up and running. That's why DORA implicitly includes DNS under its scope of ICT third-party risk.

How UltraDNS Has You Covered

Here's how UltraDNS already supports your DORA compliance goals:

High Availability, Always-On Resilience

UltraDNS operates on a global anycast network with dozens of nodes, delivering:

  • 100% uptime SLAs
  • Built-in DDoS mitigation
  • Active-active infrastructure to minimize latency and downtime

That level of reliability maps directly to DORA's requirement for operational continuity and availability.

Security by Design

Security is baked into everything we do. That includes:

  • DNSSEC to prevent cache poisoning and man-in-the-middle attacks
  • Multi-signer DNSSEC to allow flexibility and failover across providers
  • Mandatory 2FA options to protect access to your DNS configurations
  • Regular third-party security audits

Transparency and Monitoring

DORA emphasizes visibility into ICT risks. UltraDNS gives you:

  • Detailed reporting and logging
  • Access to the UltraDNS Private Data Lake for advanced DNS query analysis
  • Dashboards, analytics, and alerts to keep your team informed

Business Continuity and Recovery

Our architecture is designed for failover and geographic redundancy. In case of an incident, your DNS continues running without disruption.

Plus, we have:

  • Documented incident response procedures
  • Regular disaster recovery testing
  • Support for data durability with storage in highly available environments

We're Your Resilience Partner

DORA also asks financial institutions to vet their third-party vendors. We make that easy by offering:

  • Clear contracts with SLAs and exit strategies
  • Compliance documentation on request
  • Support for your risk assessments and audits

Final Thoughts

DORA isn't just a regulation—it's a mindset. It's about building resilience in every layer of your digital operations, including DNS. At UltraDNS, we're not just "OK" with DORA—we're built for it.

Do you have questions about DORA compliance or want help with documentation? Please post your thoughts or reach out directly in the thread.

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