IT Services for Financial Services FirmsNY DFS Part 500 · SEC Reg S-P · GLBA · FFIEC · FINRA-Aware

A managed services provider runs the day-to-day IT for your firm on a fixed monthly fee. For an RIA, family office, broker-dealer, or community bank, that means help desk for staff, security operations, network and Wi-Fi management, Microsoft 365 administration, immutable backup, vendor risk management, and one number to call when anything technical breaks. Done well, it also produces the WISP, the IR plan, the pen test report, the vendor register, and the board cybersecurity report your regulator will ask about by name.

Yes. NY DFS Part 500 has been in force since 2017 with the major amendments effective phased through 2024. The SEC Regulation S-P amendments published in May 2024 imposed a written incident response program with a 30-day customer notification trigger when substantial harm becomes reasonably likely; compliance dates ran through December 2025 and June 2026 depending on entity size. We build the cybersecurity program, IR runbook, and vendor oversight evidence both regimes expect.

Three big differences. Compliance density: a single firm can sit inside NY DFS Part 500, SEC Reg S-P, GLBA Safeguards, FFIEC CAT, FINRA Rule 4370, and PCI DSS 4.0.1 at the same time. Threat profile: financial services has been the most-targeted industry vertical in three of the last four IBM X-Force reports, with wire-fraud BEC the most common loss event. Examiner posture: regulators ask for specific artifacts (WISP, IR plan, pen test, vendor register, board report) by name. A generalist MSP that ignores any of those layers is a liability when the exam letter lands.

Yes. Microsoft 365 for financial firms is configured for SEC Rule 17a-4 and FINRA Rule 4511 books-and-records retention, often integrated with a third-party archive (Smarsh, Global Relay, Proofpoint) for the WORM-compliant capture and supervision examiners expect. We handle tenant build, identity baseline, conditional access, DLP for advisor inboxes, and mailbox-level retention policies. We also support GCC Government Cloud where a firm has government clients triggering FedRAMP-adjacent requirements.

Penetration testing for a small advisory firm is typically scoped as external network, internal network, and a web application or M365 attack-path test, with optional social-engineering. The work follows PTES, OWASP, and NIST 800-115 methodology. The deliverable is a remediation-prioritized report fit for examiners and cyber-insurance carriers. We schedule the test against your exam cycle so the report is current when it matters and we re-test critical findings without billing the second engagement.

Layered. MFA with conditional access on every advisor inbox. Phishing-resistant MFA (FIDO2 keys or platform passkeys) for highest-risk principals. Email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) tuned to enforce. Inbox rule monitoring to detect attacker-created forwarding rules. Dark web monitoring on advisor and executive credentials. Cyber awareness training with phishing simulation tuned to wire-fraud pretexting. Out-of-band callback verification documented in the wire authorization workflow. The combination is what cyber-insurance carriers expect and what the examiners ask about.

Yes. Carrier questionnaires now ask for MFA coverage, EDR deployment, immutable backup with tested restore, an incident response plan, vendor risk management, an annual penetration test, and an awareness training program. We organize the evidence as an ongoing artifact set so the answers reflect what is actually in production, not aspirations. When the renewal questionnaire shows up four weeks before expiry, you are not scrambling for screenshots.

Yes. We map current posture against the Cyber Risk Institute Profile that FFIEC pointed to when it sunset the legacy CAT in August 2025, and the equivalent maturity domains community banks and credit unions are still expected to demonstrate. For NCUA-supervised credit unions we support the Information Security Examination workflow specifically. We then build the evidence library examiners actually want to see: governance, threat intelligence, controls, dependency management, and incident response.

Co-managed is a frequent setup. Your in-house IT lead keeps strategic ownership and the small daily decisions. We handle the layers a one-person shop cannot cover alone: 24/7 SOC, MDR, dark web monitoring, annual pen test, vendor risk register, after-hours coverage, exam-packet maintenance, and the documentation regulators and insurers ask for. Scope is explicit about who does what so nothing falls between the cracks at exam time. OST also offers co-managed IT services as a structured engagement.

Our Foundation tier targets a defensible baseline in 4–6 weeks: WISP drafted, MFA across staff, conditional access on M365, immutable backup, EDR, awareness training, and an IR runbook. Higher-touch posture (Regulator-Ready or Premier) takes 6–8 weeks for full onboarding because of the additional pen test, vendor register buildout, and tabletop drill. The pace is set by how mature the existing environment is and how many vendors hold customer data on your behalf.

Yes. Cybersecurity, MDR, dark web monitoring, penetration testing, Microsoft 365 administration, backup, and IR support are all delivered remotely to financial firms across the United States. On-site engineering work (server moves, structured cabling, multi-site network builds, branch security cameras, in-person IR triage) is concentrated in Northern NJ, the NYC metro, Pennsylvania, and South Florida where we have engineers on the ground. If you are outside those regions and need on-site, we will tell you up front during scoping.

Pricing depends on user count, regulator load, and how mature the environment is when we start. Foundation engagements are fixed-price; Regulator-Ready and Premier tiers are monthly retainers scaled to firm size and exam cadence. Send us a message through the form on this page and we will come back with a scoped estimate, not a pile of disclaimers. If you want a ballpark first, our IT cost calculator covers the managed-IT layer (we add the security and compliance layers separately).