Guide

Elevating SOC Efficiency: A 2025 Guide for Banking Leaders in Qatar

This guide highlights the top hurdles impacting SOC efficiency in FinServ. It offers practical solutions for overcoming them, focusing on automation, enhanced visibility, and unified platforms that align security with IT operations to simplify the investigation steps.

Running a security operations center (SOC) can be complex and hectic under the best of circumstances. Analysts are overwhelmed by alerts and juggling dozens of tools. They’re struggling with a shortage of skilled analysts while contending with leadership increasing pressure to reduce mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), potential dwell time, and budget.

In financial services (FinServ), the problem is compounded by unique challenges and heavy regulations, including the Qatar Central Bank (QCB) Guidelines and NCSA Cybersecurity Framework.

  • Qatar Central Bank (QCB) Guidelines: Threat intelligence sharing, automated compliance reporting
  • NCSA Cybersecurity Framework: Threat hunting, risk assessment, and security automation

These regulations significantly impact staffing requirements, increase the need for robust documentation and reporting, mandate specific technology tools, and impose process constraints to ensure compliance and resilience against emerging cyber threats.

These factors are all obstacles to efficient operations. Once you complete your workflow documentation, processes, escalation paths, standardize responses, and get past all the bureaucracy, there is still a question of visibility, as well as manual processes.