DORA Compliance and Continuous ICT (Cyber) Risk Monitoring

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) mandates that financial institutions implement continuous ICT (cyber) risk monitoring as a core component of their operational resilience strategy. With the compliance deadline of January 17, 2025, organizations must adopt systems that not only detect vulnerabilities in real time but also provide meaningful, actionable insights to support business decisions .

Continuous Cyber Risk Monitoring and DORA

DORA’s Article 8 focuses on the continuous identification of ICT (cyber) risks, requiring financial entities to implement cyber risk real-time monitoring across their entire digital infrastructure. These requirements extend to the organization’s internal systems and external relationships, ensuring that any potential cyber risk caused are identified and mitigated before they escalate into serious consequences. This seems obvious, but is not always considered, and is one of the most overlooked aspects about ICT (cyber) risk monitoring: you can’t effectively monitor cyber risks continuously, as DORA requires, if you don’t have continuous digital asset discovery . Those assets need to be contextualized and valued to calculate the potential consequences, which are essential for accurately calculating and monitoring cyber risk, and for prioritizing effective cyber risk mitigations.

Another important aspect is that this cyber risk methodology must be transparent and based on established standards , ensuring consistency, fostering trust among stakeholders, and allowing for clear benchmarking and alignment with regulatory requirements like DORA:

Financial entities shall, on a continuous basis, identify all sources of ICT risk, in particular the risk exposure to and from other financial entities, and assess cyber threats and ICT vulnerabilities relevant to their ICT supported business functions, information assets and ICT assets. (DORA, Art 8, Section 2)

The Question of “How Continuous Is Continuous?”

In a fast-moving digital world, real-time monitoring becomes essential. But what does continuous really mean? For financial institutions facing evolving cyber threats, periodic assessments are no longer sufficient. Systems like Vision One ensure that continuous monitoring reflects real-time changes in the threat landscape, adapting dynamically to keep up with both the speed of business operations and the ever-shifting cyber risk environment.

Using Cyber Risk Scoring and Reporting for DORA Compliance

An additional benefit of cyber risk scoring and reporting systems is that they can help financial institutions not only assess their own risk but also communicate it clearly to other organizations. Sharing cyber risk scores with other institutions—whether partners, service providers, or regulators—allows for greater transparency and collaboration. This shared visibility into your cyber risk level can assist other institutions in complying with DORA, as they are also required to assess and monitor potential cyber risks arising from their relationships with third parties.

By providing clear, standardized reports based on cyber risk scoring , institutions can demonstrate their compliance and risk posture, fostering trust and helping all parties meet DORA’s continuous monitoring requirements. This can streamline audits, regulatory checks, and collaboration, ensuring that cyber risk is managed effectively across interconnected entities in the financial ecosystem.

Compliance Deadline: January 17, 2025

As January 17, 2025 approaches, financial institutions must ensure that their monitoring systems meet the requirements for continuous cyber risk management set forth by DORA. Trend Micro Vision One enables these institutions to not only comply but also operationalize real-time monitoring and automated threat mitigation, making continuous monitoring practical and effective.

How Trend Micro Vision One? Cyber Risk Scoring Operationalizes Continuous Monitoring

To meet DORA’s strict requirements, financial institutions need more than just traditional cybersecurity tools. Trend Micro Vision One? Cyber Risk Scoring enables organizations to operationalize continuous monitoring effectively by providing real-time visibility, threat detection, and automated response capabilities. But more importantly, this system also serves as a common language that bridges the gap between cybersecurity teams and business leaders, enhancing both decision-making and strategic alignment.

How Trend Micro Vision One? Makes Continuous Monitoring Possible:

1. Deploy Vision One Continuous Cyber Risk Scoring: Vision One’s continuous cyber risk scoring provides an up-to-the-minute assessment of an organization’s overall cyber risk posture. By dynamically adjusting cyber risk scores based on vulnerability exposure, threat intelligence, and the state of security controls, it gives organizations a real-time understanding of their current cyber risk landscape.
2. Comprehensive Digital Asset Discovery: One of the core strengths of Vision One is its ability to discover and continuously monitor digital assets across the entire IT ecosystem. This includes: endpoins (both managed and unmanaged), servers (on-premises and in the cloud), identities, mailboxes, network traffic, containers and serverless enviroments, APIs and microservices, cloud assets, etc. This discovery process ensures that no part of the organization’s infrastructure is left unchecked, giving security teams a complete, real-time inventory of the digital landscape. This capability is essential for understanding the full scope of cyber risks, especially as digital environments grow increasingly complex
3. Deploy Vision One for Real-Time Threat & Vulnerability Detection: Vision One continuously scans for both threats and vulnerabilities across the organization’s ICT digital assets, identifying cyber risks before they can be exploited. This ensures proactive threat management, a key requirement under DORA .
4. Proactive Threat Management and Automated Responses: Vision One automatically takes action based on the severity of detected cyber risks. For example, if a vulnerability with a high-risk score is found, Vision One can disable compromised accounts or initiate other security protocols, providing real-time mitigation and reducing response times? .
5. Integration with Existing Security Stacks: Trend Micro Vision One integrates seamlessly into an organization’s existing security infrastructure, ensuring that all critical ICT systems are continuously monitored and assessed .
6. Predictive and Adaptive Threat Analysis: Vision One leverages advanced analytics and extended detection and response (XDR) telemetry to provide predictive insights, helping organizations anticipate future vulnerabilities and adjust their defenses proactively. This aligns perfectly with DORA’s mandate for continuous cyber risk assessment .

Creating a Common Language for Business and Cybersecurity

One of the most significant advantages of Trend Micro Vision One? Cyber Risk Scoring is its ability to create a common language between cybersecurity teams and business leaders. Traditionally, cybersecurity metrics can be difficult for non-technical stakeholders to interpret, making it challenging to align security initiatives with business objectives. Vision One solves this problem by translating complex cybersecurity data into transparent and easy-to-understand cyber risk scores that reflect the organization’s overall security posture.

Advantages of a Common Language:

1. Enhanced Decision-Making: By presenting cyber risk in a clear, numeric way, Vision One allows business leaders to make informed decisions about cybersecurity investments, prioritizing areas that pose the highest cyber risk to the organization’s operations and financial health .
2. Strategic Alignment: Vision One helps align cybersecurity efforts with broader business objectives by providing real-time insights that business leaders can use to balance risk and opportunity. This strategic alignment ensures that security initiatives support long-term business goals rather than being viewed as isolated, technical tasks.
3. Improved Communication: With a shared understanding of cyber risk , Vision One fosters better communication between cybersecurity teams and business stakeholders. Cyber risk scores are easily interpreted across departments, ensuring that everyone—from the security team to the board of directors—understands the organization’s current cyber risk exposure and what actions are being taken to mitigate it .
4. Resource Allocation: Vision One’s cyber risk scoring system helps organizations allocate resources more effectively by pinpointing which systems, assets, or processes are most at risk. This allows for smarter investments in cybersecurity measures, ensuring that the areas that need the most protection receive the necessary attention .

Clock is ticking

With the January 2025 DORA deadline looming, financial institutions need solutions that offer more than just basic compliance—they need tools that make continuous monitoring operationally effective. Trend Micro Vision One? Cyber Risk Scoring not only provides real-time visibility and actionable intelligence but also creates a common language between cybersecurity teams and business leaders, improving decision-making and aligning security initiatives with broader business objectives.

As financial institutions move toward compliance, the question remains: Is your organization’s cyber risk monitoring truly continuous, and does it provide the clarity needed for both security teams and business leaders to make informed decisions?