For an EU-regulated financial entity, Microsoft Azure is a capable and common choice — but running regulated financial workloads on it is not a matter of provisioning resources and trusting the brand. It is a matter of building the environment to satisfy DORA, data-residency rules and supervisory expectations, and being able to evidence that you have. Azure provides the tools and the compliance credentials to do this well; it does not do it for you, and the gap between “we’re on Azure” and “our Azure environment meets our regulatory obligations and we can prove it” is where a supervisor will look.
What the regime actually demands of your cloud
A regulated financial entity’s use of Azure has to answer several regulatory questions at once. DORA treats your cloud provider as a critical ICT third party, with expectations on contractual terms, resilience, exit and oversight that you must satisfy regardless of how good the provider is. Data residency and sovereignty require you to know, and prove, where your data sits — including backups, replicas and support flows — against EU and any national requirements. Operational resilience requires that you can stay within your impact tolerances even if part of the cloud environment fails, which means architecting for it, not assuming it. And you must be able to evidence all of this to a supervisor, which turns good practice into documented, demonstrable control.
The decisions that carry weight
- The landing zone and its controls. How you structure accounts, identity, network and policy determines whether the environment is governed by design or configured ad hoc. A well-architected landing zone with enforced policy is the foundation of a defensible Azure estate.
- Data residency, proven. Provision and configure so that data — and all its copies and flows — stays where your obligations require, and be able to show it contractually and technically.
- Concentration and exit. DORA expects you to understand your dependency on the provider and to have a tested exit or contingency. Being unable to move is a finding, not just a risk.
- Resilience within tolerance. Architect the critical services so a regional or component failure keeps you within your impact tolerances, and test that this holds.
Building it defensibly
- Design the landing zone for governance and evidence. Bake in identity, policy, logging and residency controls so compliance is structural, not bolted on.
- Treat the provider relationship as DORA expects. Contractual terms, oversight, resilience and exit for a critical third party, documented.
- Prove residency and resilience, don’t assume them. Configure deliberately and generate the evidence a supervisor will ask for.
- Involve someone who reads both the architecture and the regulation. The value is in the person who can connect an Azure design decision to the DORA article or residency rule it satisfies.
Azure is entirely capable of hosting a regulated EU financial entity’s workloads compliantly, and many run on it well. The difference between the firms that pass supervisory scrutiny and those that scramble is that the first built their Azure environment as a regulated system from the start — governed landing zone, proven residency, tested resilience, documented third-party oversight — while the second provisioned a cloud estate and hoped the provider’s compliance credentials would cover them. They do not; the responsibility, and the evidence, are yours.
Free · 4 minutes
Do you actually know what you are running — and what it is about to cost you?
Fourteen questions on the systems you depend on, the ones nobody owns, and the support dates that turn a routine upgrade into a forced re-platform. Banded finding on screen, full sheet by email.
Who this is for
This reading is for:
- CTOs and cloud architects at EU-regulated financial entities
- Compliance leads mapping Azure against DORA and residency rules
- Firms building or reviewing an Azure landing zone
- Boards accountable for the resilience of a cloud-hosted core
Sixteen Pillars helps regulated entities build their Azure environment as a regulated system – governed landing zone, proven residency, tested resilience, documented third-party oversight. Pricing is published at /pricing/. If this is live for your organisation and you would like an independent reading, the place to start is a conversation.
Sixteen Pillars is a technology governance consultancy based in Cyprus. Engagements run remote across the EU, UK, and Middle East, with on-site time where the engagement requires it.
Free interactive tool
Website compliance checklist
What your site has to do, based on what it actually does
Answer as much or as little as you like — the list builds as you go. Nothing is stored against your name and no email is required.
Everything that applies
Ordered by what to do first: legal requirements you can close quickly, then larger pieces of work, then what is expected rather than required. Not exhaustive, and not a legal audit.
Dated PDF, yours to keep or circulate.
Free interactive tool
Interactive deadline calculator
Check which regulations apply to you and when
Regulation across the EU, UK, US and Asia-Pacific has moved considerably in the past eighteen months, and several headline dates have shifted more than once. Twelve questions, about three minutes.
Results are shown on screen — no email required. A dated summary is available to download, and can be sent on if that's more useful. What we do with your answers.
Most technology problems are not technology problems. They are control problems.
The systems exist. The investment has been made. The question is whether leadership can understand, direct, evidence, and sustain what those systems produce. Find out where control exists — and where it only appears to.
Full Governance by Sixteen Pillars
Govern your business. Prove your compliance.
A board assurance cockpit for EU-regulated financial firms — tamper-evident, hash-chained proof of governance across DORA, GDPR, NIS2, ISO 27001, the EU AI Act and MiCA. In development.
See what's coming