Building a DORA Ready Security Review Process for SaaS

Manual security reviews won’t survive DORA.

SaaS moves faster than ever. Features go live daily, architectures evolve weekly, and new integrations show up without warning. At the same time, regulators are only getting stricter than they’ve ever been. With the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) now in effect, you need to prove that every change, whether it’s a new vendor, an infrastructure update, or a shift in system design, has been reviewed for security and backed by evidence.

But how can you do that if your teams are still relying on manual and meeting-heavy processes? Whiteboard sessions, long email threads, and scattered spreadsheets might have worked in a slower world, but they don’t scale when development cycles are measured in hours. Manual reviews create gaps, slow delivery, and leave you scrambling when an auditor asks for proof you can’t quickly produce. Worse, they force your security team into administrative work instead of risk reduction.

Table of Contents

1. DORA breaks manual security reviews
2. The real cost of staying manual
3. How automation makes security reviews DORA-ready
4. Build a security review process that meets DORA
5. From compliance fire drill to continuous security

DORA Breaks Manual Security Reviews

Forget quarterly security reviews. DORA requires continuous risk assessment tied directly to business outcomes. Your annual pen test and static threat models won't save you here.

DORA demands:

• Continuous monitoring of ICT risk (not point-in-time assessments)
• Documentation that maps directly to resilience outcomes
• Governance with teeth - actual evidence

Tracking security reviews in spreadsheets is equivalent to building yourself a compliance nightmare nowadays. Manual security reviews fail spectacularly under DORA for three reasons:

They're too damn slow. Two-week design reviews in a daily release cycle? Your code is already in production before the security meeting even starts.

They don't scale. Your AppSec team is what? Five people? Ten if you're lucky? Meanwhile, your engineering org is shipping hundreds of changes weekly. The math doesn't work.

They're wildly inconsistent. Bob's threat model looks nothing like Alice's. One focuses on authentication flaws, the other on data leakage. Neither maps cleanly to DORA's resilience requirements.

When your security review process depends entirely on human bandwidth, you're setting yourself up for failure. The speed of SaaS delivery and the level of evidence required by regulators mean you can’t rely on slow, inconsistent, meeting-driven processes.

The real cost of staying manual

Manual reviews create hidden costs across engineering, security, and compliance. For SaaS teams operating under DORA, these costs compound into missed deadlines, rising technical debt, and real exposure when regulators start asking for evidence.

Engineering drag

Your developers hate security reviews. Not because they don't care about security, but because the process is painful.

• Two-week design reviews that stall releases: A simple feature can take weeks to clear because security is waiting on documentation, meetings, and approvals.
• Context-switching developers to fix late findings: By the time a security issue is flagged, developers have already moved on to other work. Pulling them back to patch old features breaks momentum and creates frustration. Worse, fixes take longer because context has to be relearned.
• Technical debt piling up with every sprint: When reviews can’t keep pace, many issues simply don’t get addressed. Teams push them into backlogs, prioritize new features, and hope nothing breaks in production. Over time, this creates a mountain of unresolved security debt that grows faster than it can be paid down.
• Reviews that don’t match SaaS velocity: A review process designed for quarterly releases doesn’t work in a world where deployments happen daily. Security ends up either becoming the bottleneck or being skipped entirely.
• Skilled staff tied up in low-value work: Your most experienced security engineers spend hours combing through design docs instead of focusing on high-risk areas. The result is wasted talent and reduced impact from your senior staff.

That friction has a cost. Engineers start avoiding security reviews and start building workarounds. They ship code without waiting for approval, and your risk exposure grows with every sprint.

I've seen teams create shadow architecture docs just to avoid triggering security reviews. Is that happening in your org? Are you sure?

Risk exposure that compounds

Manual reviews create risk in three ways:

• Flaws slipping into production because reviews lag: SaaS systems change daily, but manual reviews are too slow to catch risks before release. The result is predictable: exploitable flaws running in production environments with no controls in place.
• Audit findings when controls aren’t mapped correctly: If your evidence of governance lives in scattered notes or out-of-date spreadsheets, auditors will flag it as a gap. Even if the security work was done, without defensible documentation, you fail compliance checks.
• Breach costs amplified by compliance penalties: A single security incident already carries direct costs in recovery, downtime, and customer trust. Under DORA, the same incident now comes with regulatory fines and legal exposure if you can’t prove you had proper review processes in place.

The longer you wait to fix this, the worse it gets. Technical debt compounds, but security debt is worse because it compounds with interest paid in breach costs.

How automation makes security reviews DORA-ready

Manual reviews collapse under the speed of SaaS and the scrutiny of DORA. Automation changes the equation by turning static one-off reviews into continuous and defensible security evidence. Instead of chasing documents and holding workshops, you get living risk models, clear prioritization, and audit-ready outputs that scale with your business.

From docs to living threat models

Stop treating threat models as documents. They should be living artifacts that evolve with your systems.

Pulling context directly from design docs, Jira, Slack, and diagrams

Automation works because it doesn’t ask engineers to change how they work. Instead of filling out templates or attending more meetings, the system ingests the artifacts teams already produce: design specs in Confluence, Jira tickets, Slack threads, or architecture diagrams. That raw context becomes the foundation of the security review.

Updating risk models automatically as systems evolve

A manual threat model goes stale as soon as the architecture changes. Automated systems keep models current by tracking changes in code, infrastructure, or vendor integrations. Add a new API, shift a data flow, or integrate a third-party service, and the risk model updates itself without waiting for the next quarterly review.

Mapping findings to resilience requirements in real time

DORA requires not just identifying risks but showing how controls tie back to resilience. Automation makes this traceable: every finding, control, and mitigation can be mapped directly to resilience and operational continuity requirements. That means when auditors ask for evidence, you already have a defensible record.

Risk prioritization that actually works

Most security tools vomit findings without context. That's useless. Effective automation must:

Rank threats by exploitability and business impact

One of the biggest problems with manual reviews is noise. Automation cuts through it by ranking risks based on real exploitability and business impact. Instead of handing engineers a long list of possible issues, it highlights what attackers could actually exploit and what would matter most to your business if breached.

Give engineers actionable and dev-ready tasks

Automation also translates risks into work items that engineers can actually act on. Findings are pushed directly into pull requests, CI/CD pipelines, or Jira tickets. Each task includes context, recommended mitigations, and severity, so developers know what to fix and why.

Tailoring reporting for CISOs, architects, and auditors

Different stakeholders need different levels of visibility. Automation makes it possible to generate role-specific outputs from the same review data:

• Developers see clear and fixable issues.
• Architects see system-level flaws and patterns.
• CISOs and auditors see high-level evidence tied to business risk and compliance frameworks.

Automation makes DORA compliance achievable at SaaS speed. You get continuous threat models, prioritized risks, and audit-ready reporting without slowing down engineering or burning out your security team.

Build a security review process that meets DORA

The most effective approach is to build around the workflows and artifacts your teams already generate, then layer automation and validation on top.Ready to fix this? Here's how to build a security review process that works under DORA.

Start with what you already have

You don’t need to reinvent documentation to satisfy DORA. Most of the context already exists: product requirement docs (PRDs), architecture diagrams, Jira tickets, and even Slack conversations. Instead of asking teams to fill out new templates, feed those real-world artifacts into your review system.

The fastest way to fail adoption is to make developers do extra work for compliance. If your process demands new diagrams, special spreadsheets, or one-off reviews, teams will bypass it. By using what’s already being produced, you eliminate friction and ensure security reviews keep pace with development.

Design the human + Automation workflow

Automation isn't about replacing security teams, but about making them more effective:

• Automation handles ingestion, correlation, and threat modeling
• Security validates findings and drives business context
• Feedback loops ensure models keep learning

Your security experts should focus on the hard problems that require human judgment instead of copying data between spreadsheets.

But does it work?

DORA doesn’t care how many issues you logged. But were you able to identify, understand, and address risks? DORA cares about resilience outcomes:

• Risk scoring tied to real systems, not just issue counts
• Metrics that boards and auditors can trust
• Demonstrable evidence of resilience testing

Stop documenting your process and start documenting your results. That's what regulators want to see.

From compliance fire drill to continuous security

DORA makes one thing clear: manual reviews won’t keep your SaaS secure or compliant. The risks are too high, the costs too steep, and the pace of change too fast.

This is now a leadership priority. DORA doesn’t give you the option to delay or rely on outdated processes. You need a review system that scales with SaaS velocity and produces evidence that regulators will accept.

Your next step is to assess how your current reviews actually work:

• How long do design or architecture reviews take today?
• Can you trace risks, controls, and mitigations back to business outcomes?
• If an auditor asked for defensible evidence tomorrow, could you deliver it?

With SecurityReview.ai, you can turn the artifacts your teams already create into living threat models, continuous risk assessments, and audit-ready outputs. Instead of dragging engineers into more meetings, it pulls from their existing workflows and gives your security team the evidence it needs. You get consistency, coverage, and clarity without adding headcount or slowing delivery.

DORA is here, and it’s not waiting. Start by reviewing how your security reviews actually happen today, and ask whether they’ll hold up under regulatory and operational pressure. Then take the step toward automation that keeps your business resilient.

Because in the end, staying manual is a risk you can’t afford to carry.