PART I - DORA AS AN OPERATIONAL REGULATION

This part establishes DORA not as a legal text to be interpreted in isolation, but as an operational regulation that reshapes how financial institutions are governed, managed, and run daily. It explains why DORA moves regulatory compliance away from static policies and periodic reporting toward continuous execution, evidence, and decision-making under uncertainty. The focus is on translating legal obligations into operational controls, roles, and routines that function during normal operations as well as during crises. This part clarifies the shift from system-centric thinking to service-centric resilience and highlights the central role of the management body in operational outcomes. It introduces the concepts of accountability, decision authority, and evidentiary discipline as regulatory requirements rather than best practices. Attention is given to the interaction between governance, technology, and human decision-making. The part also explains why traditional compliance approaches fail under DORA and how operational failures quickly become governance failures. It sets the foundation for understanding alerts, incidents, recovery, learning loops, and continuous improvement as inseparable elements of compliance. Finally, it positions DORA as a baseline expectation for resilience maturity rather than an end state, preparing the reader for the detailed operational frameworks that follow.