Managed IT and Cybersecurity Support Built for RIAs and Wealth Management Firms
Wealth management firms in St. Louis run on client trust, and that trust depends on systems that stay up, stay compliant, and stay quiet about problems until they’re already fixed. A general IT provider can keep a network running, but it isn’t built to handle FINRA, SEC, and GLBA obligations, custodian integrations, or the operational cost of a 20-minute outage during market hours. Alliance Tech builds IT environments specifically for RIAs, wealth managers, and broker-dealers across St. Louis, so your advisors, your compliance officer, and your clients can rely on the technology behind every portfolio.
Why Alliance Tech
- Over 25 years serving financial services firms from our headquarters in Chesterfield, with a second office in Grand Rapids
- 600+ professional certifications across our engineering team, spanning cybersecurity, cloud, infrastructure, and compliance
- Pre-established escalation relationships with the custodians and platforms your firm already uses, including Redtail, Orion, Schwab, and Fidelity
- The Armada managed IT stack, deployed within the first 30 days: endpoint security, MDR, email security, backup, and patching
- Full environment discovery across Microsoft 365, Active Directory, and endpoints before we change anything
The Alliance Tech team is by and large the best IT service and support team in the business! Highly recommend them for your business solutions!
Why Wealth Management Firms Struggle with General IT Support
Most of the infrastructure gaps we find when we take over a new financial services client aren’t caused by neglect. They’re caused by an IT provider who never had a reason to look for them. The patterns repeat across nearly every firm we onboard:
- MFA enforced on some applications and some users, not all of them
- No formal offboarding process, leaving departed employees with active accounts or mailbox access
- Personal devices accessing corporate email and client data with no mobile device management in place
- Client PII and financial records sitting in personal OneDrives or SharePoint sites with broad, unmonitored sharing permissions
- No documented incident response plan or business continuity plan
- Patch levels six to eighteen months behind on endpoints
- Backups that run every night but have never been tested with an actual restore
Any one of these is a liability. Several of them together is what a regulator or a cyber insurance carrier calls material risk exposure.
How We Secure and Support Wealth Management Firms
Assessment
Before we touch anything, we run a full environment discovery across Microsoft 365, Active Directory, and every endpoint. We prioritize by risk, not by convenience: who has admin rights, what’s reachable from the internet, whether MFA is actually enforced, and whether your backups would survive a real restore. Compliance and documentation gaps get mapped at the same time, because for a regulated firm, a GLBA gap is almost always a security gap too.
Implementation
Financial firms need network segmentation that a standard small business doesn’t. We build hard VLAN separation between advisor workstations, compliance and document servers, VoIP, and guest Wi-Fi, with firewall rules controlling traffic between them. On the Microsoft 365 side, that means Conditional Access tied to device compliance and location, data loss prevention policies that catch SSNs and account numbers before they leave the firm, and anti-phishing rules tuned for the custodian brands attackers spoof most, like Schwab and Fidelity.
Ongoing Support
Once your environment is stabilized, the work shifts to keeping it that way. That includes a defined patch and vulnerability management cadence, monthly spot restores on a rotating subset of your data, and quarterly full restores of at least one critical system, with results documented for your compliance file. For details on how we test recovery, see our data backup services for St. Louis financial firms.
Security and Monitoring
Visibility is the difference between catching a problem and finding out about it from a client. We monitor for external email forwarding rules, unusual sign-ins, anonymous SharePoint links, and Conditional Access failures that often mean someone is working around a control on a personal device. Unified Audit Log stays enabled and retained for as long as your compliance obligations require, which is frequently the first thing we find missing during onboarding.
Wealth managers, RIAs, and broker-dealers working with Alliance Tech can also review our SEC-compliant IT services for RIAs, our broader financial services IT page, and our St. Louis Financial Firm Technology Guide for a deeper look at the regulatory and technical landscape.
What Downtime and a Data Breach Actually Cost
The numbers behind these risks aren’t abstract for financial services firms specifically. A survey of Global 2000 executives from Oxford Economics and Splunk found that unplanned downtime costs companies an average of $200 million a year, with IT and cybersecurity issues nearly equally responsible for the outages behind that figure, according to the Oxford Economics report. Every minute your advisors can’t reach client data or execute a trade adds to that number.
On the compliance side, SEC amendments to Regulation S-P now require covered institutions, including SEC-registered investment advisers, to maintain written policies for an incident response program and to notify affected individuals when their sensitive customer information was accessed or used without authorization, with a compliance date of December 3, 2025 for larger entities and June 3, 2026 for smaller ones, per FINRA’s cybersecurity advisory. Firms without a tested, documented response plan are already behind.
Phishing remains the entry point behind most of this exposure. Business email compromise losses climbed to $6.3 billion industry-wide in 2025, with a median loss of $50,000 per incident, according to the 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, which is why email security, impersonation protection, and staff training aren’t optional line items on a wealth manager’s security stack.
Why Businesses Choose Alliance Tech
Financial firms don’t need a bigger help desk. They need a partner who already understands FINRA, SEC Regulation S-P, and GLBA, who has a relationship with your custodian before an incident happens, and who documents what regulators and cyber insurers actually ask to see. We prioritize security first, because a firm can operate with outdated documentation or slow systems, but it cannot operate through a ransomware event or a breach notification. Compliance and documentation follow closely behind, since for a wealth management firm the two are rarely separate problems.
Get Started with IT Services for Wealth Managers in St. Louis
Your advisors, your compliance officer, and your clients all depend on systems that hold up under regulatory scrutiny and market-hour pressure. Alliance Tech has spent over 25 years building that kind of infrastructure for financial firms in St. Louis, and we can show you exactly where your current environment stands before you commit to anything.
FAQ
How is IT support for wealth managers different from general business IT? A general provider keeps systems running. A wealth management firm needs network segmentation, audit logging, and documentation that can survive a FINRA or SEC exam, plus pre-established relationships with the custodians and platforms your advisors use every day.
What happens in the first 30 days after switching to Alliance Tech? We deploy our Armada stack (endpoint security, MDR, email security, backup, and patching), run a full discovery across Microsoft 365, Active Directory, and endpoints, and identify your most urgent risks, all without disrupting daily operations.
How often should backup restores be tested for a regulated firm? At minimum, monthly spot restores on a rotating subset of data and a quarterly full restore of at least one critical system, both documented. Regulators and cyber insurers treat an untested backup the same as no backup at all.