patkusch DORA assessment
Regulation (EU) 2022/2554. Applicable since 17 January 2025 — no transition period remaining, unlike the AI Act.
The reason this skill exists: for a great many AI systems in financial services, the EU AI Act analysis comes back negative and everyone relaxes. DORA is frequently the regime that actually binds, it is already live, and it reaches things the AI Act does not — notably operational resilience, incident reporting on a four-hour clock, and third-party concentration risk.
Run this alongside eu-ai-act-triage, not after it.
A negative AI Act finding is not an all-clear.
1. Is the entity in scope
DORA applies to some 20 categories of financial entity under Art. 2 — credit institutions, payment and e-money institutions, investment firms, crypto-asset service providers, insurers and reinsurers, pension institutions, credit rating agencies, trading venues, central counterparties, and more — plus ICT third-party service providers serving them.
If the organisation is not a financial entity, stop: DORA does not apply directly. But ask whether they are an ICT third-party provider to one, in which case DORA reaches them contractually through their financial-sector customers, and increasingly through the CTPP oversight regime if they are designated critical.
Note the proportionality regime: certain smaller entities may use the simplified ICT risk management framework under Art. 16. Establish which applies before assessing against the full set.
2. Critical or important function — the pivot
Everything downstream scales off this determination, so make it explicitly and record the reasoning.
A function is critical or important where a disruption would materially impair the financial performance of the entity, or the soundness or continuity of its services and activities, or where discontinuation would materially impair continued compliance with the conditions of its authorisation.
For AI systems the useful framing is: what breaks, and for whom, if this stops or does the wrong thing? An agent that triages internal IT tickets is unlikely to qualify. An agent that touches payment processing, trade execution, settlement, underwriting, sanctions screening, or the ICT that keeps those running very likely does — including where it is only "internal tooling", because DORA governs the ICT supporting the function, not just customer-facing systems. That misconception is the most common way firms under-scope an AI system here.
Record the outcome in supply_chain.critical_or_important_function on the system record.
3. The five pillars
Assess against each. Scale depth to the CIF determination — a non-CIF system does not warrant the full apparatus, and saying so is part of the job.
ICT risk management (Arts. 5–16). A documented framework, governed by the management body, which under Art. 5(2) bears final responsibility and cannot delegate it away. Covers identification, protection and prevention, detection, response and recovery, learning and evolving, and communication. For AI systems the questions that bite are: is the system in the ICT asset inventory at all; are its dependencies mapped; and does the detection capability actually cover model failure, or only infrastructure failure? Most monitoring will tell you the agent is up, not that it is wrong.
ICT incident management and reporting (Arts. 17–23). Classification against the RTS criteria in section 4 below, then reporting on the clocks.
Digital operational resilience testing (Arts. 24–27). A testing programme proportionate to risk, with threat-led penetration testing (TLPT) for entities so designated. For agents this is where the halt mechanism and the injection-resistance evidence live — and unlike the AI Act, DORA gives you a positive obligation to test them rather than merely to have them.
ICT third-party risk (Arts. 28–44). The register of information, contractual requirements, exit strategies, and concentration risk. If the AI system is built on a third-party model or API, that supplier is an ICT third-party service provider and belongs in the register. Model suppliers are routinely missed here because procurement booked them as software licences rather than ICT services supporting a function.
Information sharing (Arts. 45+). Voluntary. Note it, do not labour it.
4. Incident classification and reporting clocks
Is it major?
Classification is what starts the clock, so it is the time-critical decision — not a tidy-up after the investigation.
Under the RTS on classification of major incidents, an incident is major where critical services are affected and either there was any malicious unauthorised access to network and information systems, or the materiality thresholds of at least two of the remaining criteria are met.
The criteria: clients, financial counterparts and transactions affected · reputational impact · duration and service downtime · geographical spread across Member States · data losses (availability, authenticity, integrity, confidentiality) · criticality of services affected · economic impact.
Indicative thresholds — check the current RTS, these are the figures most often misquoted: more than 10% of clients using the affected service (credit institutions); downtime exceeding 2 consecutive hours during business hours; gross direct and indirect costs and losses exceeding EUR 100,000.
For an AI agent the classification question that gets missed is data losses through integrity rather than availability. An agent that stays up while producing or acting on wrong information has not caused an outage, but it may well have caused an integrity loss — and integrity is explicitly one of the data-loss limbs.
The clocks
Ask this early in any incident, because they are short and start from events that precede your investigation.
| Report | Deadline |
|---|---|
| Initial notification | Within 4 hours of classifying the incident as major, and no later than 24 hours from becoming aware |
| Intermediate report | Within 72 hours of the initial notification |
| Final report | Within 1 month, covering root cause, impact, and remediation |
The four-hour clock runs from classification, not detection — which makes the classification decision itself time-critical, and makes "we were still investigating" a poor answer. Significant cyber threats may be notified voluntarily.
Where an AI agent caused or contributed to the incident, run
ai-incident-triage in parallel: DORA needs the
operational impact classification, and the Remit diagnosis gives you the mechanism and
the remediation that the final report will need.
5. What DORA reaches that the AI Act does not
Say this explicitly in the output, because it is usually the finding that changes behaviour:
- Resilience testing as a positive obligation. The AI Act asks for robustness; DORA makes you test and evidence it on a programme.
- Incident reporting for operational disruption, regardless of whether any person's rights were affected — the AI Act's Art. 73 trigger is much narrower.
- Third-party concentration risk. Several agents on one model provider is a DORA concern and an AI Act non-issue.
- Management body accountability that cannot be delegated (Art. 5(2)).
- Exit strategies. What happens when the model provider changes the model under you, deprecates it, or fails.
Output
# DORA assessment — [system], [date]
## Scope
Entity type: [Art. 2 category] · Simplified framework (Art. 16): [yes/no]
**Critical or important function: [yes/no]** — [reasoning, explicitly]
## By pillar
| Pillar | Requirement | Status | Evidence | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
## Incident readiness
Classification process: [exists / not established]
Can the 4-hour clock be met? [assessment, not assertion]
## ICT third-party
| Provider | Service | In register? | Supports CIF? | Exit strategy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
## What DORA catches here that the AI Act does not
[The point of running both.]
## Findings
[Ordered by risk reduction.]
Append to assessments with framework: dora.
Limits
Not legal advice. DORA's detail sits substantially in regulatory technical standards and implementing standards which continue to be issued and amended, and classification thresholds in particular are RTS-driven. Verify against current ESA materials and your own competent authority's guidance, and route real determinations — especially the critical-or-important-function call and any major-incident classification — to the people who own them.
Legal content verified 17 August 2026. Re-check before relying on it.
verified: 2026-08-17 — against sources current at that date. This file restates external law or standards, which move. Re-check before relying on it; re-verify before updating this date.