PGH Networks is a Pittsburgh-based managed IT and cybersecurity provider delivering financial services IT support in Pittsburgh to registered investment advisors (RIAs), wealth managers, community banks, credit unions, and CPA firms — with controls aligned to FINRA, SEC Regulation S-P, the SEC Cybersecurity Risk Management Rule, and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) Safeguards Rule. This page walks through two anonymized engagements that show how that work actually looks on the ground in the Pittsburgh metro.
The two firms profiled below are composites drawn from real engagement patterns across Allegheny, Washington, Butler, and Westmoreland counties. Numbers are representative, not marketing claims about a specific named client.
The scenario: a Pittsburgh RIA and a regional CPA firm
The first firm is a 22-person registered investment advisor in the South Hills managing roughly $850M in client assets. After crossing the $1.5B AUM planning threshold and preparing for an SEC examination, the firm's chief compliance officer flagged that its written information security program (WISP) had not been refreshed in three years, MFA was inconsistent across Microsoft 365 and the custodial portals, and there was no documented incident response plan that mapped to SEC Reg S-P's updated 30-day customer notification requirement.
The second firm is a 60-person CPA and advisory practice with offices in Pittsburgh and Cranberry Township. Their trigger was different: a client in manufacturing asked for a SOC 2-style attestation letter, the IRS WISP requirement under Publication 4557 was tightening, and two phishing incidents in tax season had exposed how thin their email security and logging really were.
Financial firms in Pittsburgh rarely fail audits because they lack tools — they fail because no one mapped the tools they already own to the rules they're actually examined against.
The challenge: FINRA, SEC Reg S-P, and GLBA pressure
Both firms faced the same underlying problem that drives most financial services IT support in Pittsburgh engagements: overlapping regulatory frameworks with no single owner inside the business. The RIA had to satisfy SEC Reg S-P, the SEC Cybersecurity Risk Management Rule, and — for its dual-registered advisors — FINRA Rule 4370 business continuity expectations. The CPA firm sat under GLBA Safeguards, IRS Pub. 4557, and increasingly client-driven SOC 2 scrutiny.
TL;DR: The work is less about buying new security products and more about producing defensible, examiner-ready evidence that existing controls operate the way the WISP says they do.
Neither firm had a SIEM capable of retaining logs for the 12-month windows examiners now expect. Neither had tested a disaster recovery plan in the last 18 months. Both had Microsoft 365 tenants running on out-of-the-box defaults — no Conditional Access, legacy authentication still enabled in places, and audit logging not tuned for financial-services retention.
How it was solved
Discovery started with a controls-mapping workshop: every existing tool (Microsoft 365 E3, the EDR already deployed, the backup product, the firewall) was mapped against the specific FINRA, SEC, and GLBA control statements the firm would be measured on. That mapping became the spine of an updated WISP for each firm.
From there, the technical work for the RIA included deploying a co-managed SIEM with 13-month log retention covering M365, EDR, firewall, and VPN telemetry; enforcing phishing-resistant MFA and Conditional Access across all advisors and operations staff; hardening Microsoft 365 with Safe Links, Safe Attachments, anti-impersonation policies, and tenant-wide audit logging; and standing up an immutable backup tier plus a documented, tested DR/BCP runbook aligned to FINRA Rule 4370. A fractional vCISO from PGH Networks then ran a tabletop incident response exercise against an SEC Reg S-P notification scenario.
The CPA firm's path was similar but weighted toward email and data governance: M365 hardening, DLP rules tuned for taxpayer PII and client financials, MFA enforcement on the tax software portals, SIEM-backed monitoring, and a written incident response plan that satisfies IRS Pub. 4557 and GLBA. The vCISO produced the customer-facing security summary their manufacturing client had requested.
Outcomes
The RIA went into its SEC examination with a current WISP, a controls matrix mapped line-by-line to Reg S-P and the Cybersecurity Risk Management Rule, twelve months of searchable log data, and a tested DR plan. Examiner document requests that historically took two weeks of scrambling were answered in under 48 hours from the SIEM and the documentation portal.
The CPA firm closed its two open phishing-related findings, reduced mean time to detect suspicious M365 sign-ins from "whenever a user complained" to under 15 minutes via SIEM alerting, and delivered the security attestation letter that kept the manufacturing client's engagement on track. Cyber insurance renewal came back with a lower premium and fewer exclusions because MFA, EDR, immutable backups, and IR testing were all documented.
The shortest path to lower premiums and cleaner audits is boring: documented controls, tested backups, and logs you can actually search.
Takeaway for Pittsburgh financial services firms
If you run an RIA, a community bank, a credit union, or a CPA practice in the Pittsburgh region, the pattern in both stories is the same. Tooling is rarely the gap. The gap is a written program that ties Microsoft 365, EDR, SIEM, backup, and identity controls back to the specific clauses of FINRA, SEC Reg S-P, the SEC Cybersecurity Rule, GLBA, and IRS Pub. 4557 that your examiners and clients care about — plus someone accountable for keeping that mapping current.
That is the core of financial services IT support in Pittsburgh as PGH Networks delivers it: a local team within 75 miles of 15220, a vCISO who can sit across from your CCO or managing partner, and an engineering bench that runs the SIEM, M365 hardening, MFA, and DR/BCP work underneath. If that fits where your firm is heading, the next step is a controls-mapping conversation against the regulations you actually answer to.