IT and Cybersecurity for Pittsburgh Financial Services Firms

PGH Networks is a Pittsburgh-based managed services and cybersecurity provider that supports small and mid-market financial services firms across Allegheny, Washington, Butler, and Westmoreland counties, delivering IT and cybersecurity for Pittsburgh financial services firms under the frameworks their examiners and insurers actually care about: FINRA, SEC Regulation S-P, GLBA, the FTC Safeguards Rule, and SOC 2.

This page walks through an anonymized composite engagement — the kind of work we do repeatedly for registered investment advisers, wealth management practices, community banks, and CPA advisory groups in the region — so you can see how the pieces fit together before you pick up the phone.

The buyer scenario

A 28-person registered investment adviser (RIA) headquartered in the South Hills manages roughly $1.6B in client assets across two offices. The firm had grown through acquisition, inherited a mix of on-prem file servers and Microsoft 365 tenants, and was staring down three deadlines in the same quarter: an SEC examination cycle, a cyber-insurance renewal that had added new questions about MDR and MFA coverage, and a custodian security attestation. The internal "IT person" was a bright office manager with a help-desk contract on the side. Leadership knew that was no longer enough.

When your examiner, your custodian, and your insurance carrier all ask the same control question in three different vocabularies, you don't have an IT problem — you have a translation problem.

The challenge

The firm's obligations overlapped but did not line up neatly. FINRA-adjacent supervisory expectations pulled toward documented written supervisory procedures. SEC Regulation S-P and the 2024 amendments raised the bar on incident notification and vendor oversight. GLBA and the FTC Safeguards Rule required a named qualified individual, a written information security program (WISP), annual risk assessments, and evidence of employee training. The cyber underwriter wanted proof of endpoint detection and response, 24x7 monitoring, immutable backups, and phishing-resistant MFA on privileged accounts. The custodian wanted SOC 2-style attestations from any vendor touching client data.

Meanwhile the day-to-day environment had real problems: local admin rights everywhere, legacy shared mailboxes with no auditing, a backup appliance that hadn't been test-restored in over a year, and no central log retention — so if an incident ever occurred, the firm couldn't reconstruct it.

How it was solved

TL;DR: We mapped one control set to every framework the firm answers to, then implemented it as a managed service so evidence is generated automatically rather than assembled in a panic before each audit.

The engagement started with a two-week AI readiness assessment and security baseline that doubled as a gap analysis against Reg S-P, GLBA/Safeguards, and the insurer's control questionnaire. From there the work broke into four tracks.

Managed IT and identity. We took over managed IT, replaced the ad hoc help desk, deployed RMM and patch management to every endpoint, and hardened the Microsoft 365 tenant: Conditional Access, phishing-resistant MFA for advisors and admins, Safe Links and Safe Attachments, mailbox auditing on by default, and Microsoft Purview retention labels for books-and-records obligations under SEC Rule 17a-4-style retention expectations.

Detection and response. We layered cybersecurity controls the underwriter had asked for: EDR on every endpoint, a co-managed SIEM with 12 months of log retention, and 24x7 MDR with a documented mean-time-to-respond target. Ransomware playbooks were written, tabletop-tested, and stored where the incident response team could actually find them at 2 a.m.

Resilience. Immutable, offsite backups with quarterly test restores replaced the dusty appliance. RTO and RPO targets were negotiated per system — 4 hours for the portfolio management platform, 24 hours for file shares — and documented in the BCDR runbook.

Governance. A fractional vCIO and vCISO engagement produced the artifacts examiners ask for on day one: a WISP naming the qualified individual, an incident response plan, a vendor risk register, an acceptable-use policy, annual risk assessment, and a training log tied to simulated phishing results. All of it mapped to a single control matrix so one piece of evidence answers FINRA, SEC, GLBA, SOC 2, and compliance questionnaires simultaneously.

We also stood up a governed pilot for Microsoft 365 Copilot with an acceptable-use policy and Purview sensitivity labels, so advisors could use AI on internal documents without leaking client PII — the kind of guardrail our custom AI application work builds on for firms ready to go further.

Outcomes

The SEC examination closed with no material findings on technology or safeguards. The cyber-insurance renewal came back with a lower premium and higher limits after the underwriter reviewed the MDR, MFA, and immutable-backup evidence. Mean time to respond on high-severity alerts settled under 15 minutes, verified monthly. The one ransomware-adjacent event during the engagement — a compromised vendor credential — was contained at the identity layer within the same business hour, with no client data touched and a written notification decision documented against Reg S-P criteria.

Unplanned downtime across the two offices dropped to under four hours for the year, most of it a single ISP failure that failed over to secondary circuits as designed.

How this applies to your firm

The regulatory alphabet changes shape depending on your charter — a community bank answers to the FDIC and the GLBA Safeguards guidance, a broker-dealer to FINRA, an RIA to the SEC, a CPA firm to the AICPA and increasingly to WISP obligations under state privacy laws — but the underlying control set is remarkably consistent. Identity, endpoint, email, backup, logging, response, and governance. Do those seven things well, document them once, and most of your audits become evidence retrieval instead of scrambles.

Financial services firms in Pittsburgh don't need a bigger stack; they need a smaller, well-instrumented one that generates its own audit evidence.

That is the practice we've built for IT and cybersecurity for Pittsburgh financial services firms, and it is what we would bring to your next exam, renewal, or custodian review.

Talk to PGH Networks

Call 724.888.7007 or reach us through the contact form to schedule a scoped conversation about your firm's exam cycle, insurance renewal, or SOC 2 timeline.