SOC Strategies for DORA: How to Build Resilience That Lasts

The implementation of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in the EU in January 2025 marked a significant shift in financial sector cybersecurity. While DORA introduced new compliance requirements, it also highlighted opportunities to strengthen operational resilience against evolving cyber threats.

DORA is driving security operations center (SOC) and cyber threat intelligence (CTI) teams to embrace advanced tools, such as threat intelligence platforms (TIPs) and security information and event management (SIEM) systems. These technologies can help companies stay ahead of risks and ensure business continuity while meeting the expectations of regulators and stakeholders.  

Read on to discover how to simplify DORA compliance while transforming your company’s approach to threat detection and response.

Understanding DORA’s Framework

DORA establishes a comprehensive approach to digital resilience for financial institutions, focusing on preparation, response, and recovery from cyber incidents. For SOC and CTI teams, this framework introduces several key imperatives:

• Risk identification and mitigation must become proactive rather than reactive. Organizations need robust detection systems supported by real-time threat intelligence to identify vulnerabilities before they lead to incidents. ‍
• Operational continuity requires comprehensive planning and implementation. Teams must develop and maintain strategies to preserve critical services during disruptions, incorporating resilience at every operational level. Regular stress testing against various cyber threats, from ransomware to system failures, becomes essential. ‍
• Standardized incident reporting ensures that significant cyber events receive proper attention and communication. SOC teams must implement clear protocols for data collection, analysis, and sharing with regulators. This systematic approach builds credibility with stakeholders while meeting compliance requirements. ‍
• Third-party risk management takes on renewed importance under DORA. With financial entities increasingly dependent on external information and communication technology (ICT) services, organizations must thoroughly assess vendor cybersecurity capabilities, maintain ongoing performance monitoring, and establish clear contingency plans.

By enforcing these measures, DORA sets a new baseline for cybersecurity across the financial sector, from established banks to cutting-edge financial technology firms. The goal is to build a more secure and resilient financial ecosystem.

Achieve DORA Compliance with the Anomali Security and IT Operations Platform

Anomali helps financial institutions achieve DORA compliance by providing a platform that integrates threat intelligence/CTI and security analytics/SIEM capabilities, tailored to meet the regulation's specific requirements.

Proactive Risk Management

The Anomali Security and IT Operations Platform enables financial institutions to proactively identify, assess, and mitigate cyber risks with real-time threat intelligence. It enhances and contextualizes threat data, integrating with Anomali’s Security Analytics to deliver incident and threat relevance to internal telemetry. This supports DORA’s emphasis on proactive risk identification and management, ensuring organizations can anticipate and prevent incidents.  

Continuous Monitoring and Threat Detection

DORA requires continuous monitoring of ICT systems to detect, prevent, and respond to threats. Anomali aligns with this by correlating internal security data with enriched, contextualized threat intelligence from a broad range of sources (OSINT, commercial, and premium feeds) to detect sophisticated attack patterns and anomalies. Its lookback capability is measured in years and searched in seconds (not weeks and hours or days, like most competing offerings).

Streamlined Incident Reporting

The Anomali Platform generates automated reports that include detailed information on incidents, enriched with threat intelligence for added context. These reports seamlessly correlate internal telemetry with external threat data, delivering comprehensive summaries at both the technical and business levels — all within seconds.  

This functionality makes it easy to comply with DORA’s structured incident reporting requirements, ensuring timely, accurate communication with regulators, operators, and executive management.

Supply Chain Risk Oversight

DORA requires companies to oversee and manage risks from external ICT providers. Anomali ThreatStream makes this easy by enabling institutions to assess and monitor third-party vendors by identifying their services' vulnerabilities, breaches, and risks.  

Scalability for Growing Threat Landscapes

Anomali’s cloud-native platform is built to scale with organizational needs, ensuring it can handle increasing data volumes as financial institutions expand their digital footprint. This supports DORA’s requirement to establish and maintain resilient ICT systems in the face of increasingly sophisticated threats.

Unified CTI and SIEM Integration

DORA emphasizes a unified approach to compliance and enhancing overall security and operational efficiency. Anomali’s integration of ThreatStream intelligence with Security Analytics telemetry data enables financial institutions to meet this requirement, offering seamless data correlation, prioritization, and automated workflows.  

By combining advanced threat intelligence, automation, and scalability, Anomali not only helps financial institutions meet DORA requirements but also strengthens their resilience against emerging threats. This positions organizations to thrive in a regulatory environment while staying ahead in the cybersecurity landscape.  

Ready to learn more about DORA and how Anomali’s Security and IT Operations Platform can help your organization comply? Download “The DORA Playbook: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Cyber Resilience.”