For an accounting practice, an investment advisory, a trading firm or a community bank, technology now holds the two things your clients trust you with most — their money and their most sensitive financial information. That also makes you a target. North Star provides layered cybersecurity and secure, cloud-first IT built for financial services firms across the Denver metro area, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, so a security incident never becomes a client loss or a regulatory finding.
This page explains what a cyber incident actually costs a financial firm, how we secure the way accounting, advisory and banking teams really work, why a cloud-first foundation shrinks your attack surface, the layers we place between a threat and client assets, and how it all maps to the regulations your firm answers to — from IRS and FTC safeguards to SEC, GLBA and Colorado’s breach-notification law. It is one of the industries we serve across the Front Range.
The threats aimed at financial services are targeted, well-funded and financially motivated — because that is where the money and the account data live. Generic IT support is not built to stop them. The incidents we see do the most damage in six ways:
Financial services is not one business. A CPA firm, a registered investment adviser and a credit union face different regulators, different systems and different attackers. We tailor the same strong controls to each:
CPAs, tax preparers and bookkeepers hold taxpayer data that the IRS and FTC treat as strictly protected. We help you stand up and document the Written Information Security Plan (WISP) the IRS requires, meet the safeguards in IRS Publication 4557 and the FTC Safeguards Rule, and lock down the email and file access that tax-season wire fraud depends on. See our dedicated accounting firm cybersecurity page.
Registered investment advisers, broker-dealers and trading firms answer to the SEC and FINRA. We implement the access controls, monitoring, encryption and incident-response capabilities behind SEC Regulation S-P and FINRA cybersecurity expectations, and protect the custodial logins, client portals and market-data systems your business runs on. See our dedicated financial advisor & trading firm cybersecurity page.
Community banks and credit unions operate under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), FFIEC examination guidance and — for credit unions — NCUA oversight, with strict incident-notification timelines. We deliver the layered safeguards, continuous monitoring and documented controls examiners look for, plus the rapid detection needed to meet banking’s 36-hour and the credit-union 72-hour incident-notification rules. See our dedicated bank & credit union cybersecurity page.
The aging server in a back-office closet is usually both the thing most likely to fail and the largest surface you have to defend. We move financial firms to a cloud-first model where infrastructure is redundant, patched and secured by default, with no exposed on-premises server for an attacker to reach — the same secure foundation behind our Microsoft 365 cloud migration work, tuned for financial workflows.
Custodial platforms, tax and accounting software, core banking and portfolio systems — reached safely from anywhere, governed by identity and device health rather than a VPN back into an office box. Where a specialized application still requires a server, we move it to Microsoft Azure so the closet and the aging hardware still go away.
Branch office, home office or a client’s conference room — your team gets the same protected access everywhere, so remote and hybrid work never means loosening security.
No single box to fail, no three-to-five-year hardware refresh, and continuity engineered in — so a dead drive, a storm or an office move never means a missed close, filing or settlement.
No single control stops everything. We build overlapping layers so that when one is tested, the next one holds — each chosen for a specific threat financial firms face:
For financial firms, security is not just good practice — it is a legal obligation you have to prove. We build to these standards and document the configuration so you can show it to regulators, auditors, custodians and cyber-insurers:
North Star provides IT support and cybersecurity for accounting firms, advisories, trading firms, banks and credit unions across Colorado’s Front Range, including Denver, Aurora, Lakewood, Arvada, Westminster, Thornton, Northglenn, Broomfield, Centennial, Greenwood Village, Englewood, Littleton, Highlands Ranch, Parker, Castle Rock, Golden, Wheat Ridge, Colorado Springs, Monument, Fort Collins, Loveland, Windsor and Greeley, along with the surrounding communities. We also support firms with remote staff and satellite offices elsewhere in the United States.
It depends on your niche. Accounting and tax firms fall under IRS Publication 4557 and the FTC Safeguards Rule, including a required Written Information Security Plan. Investment advisers and broker-dealers answer to SEC Regulation S-P and FINRA. Banks and credit unions operate under GLBA, FFIEC guidance and NCUA rules. All of them are also subject to Colorado’s breach-notification law and the Colorado Privacy Act. We map your specific obligations to concrete controls.
Wire and payment fraud through business email compromise. Attackers watch a compromised or spoofed mailbox and slip fraudulent wire, ACH or banking-change instructions into real transactions. Enforced call-back verification, email impersonation protection and phishing-resistant MFA are the layers that stop it.
If your firm prepares taxes or handles taxpayer data, yes — the IRS and FTC require a written security plan, and you must attest to having one. We help you build, implement and document a WISP that reflects the controls actually running in your environment, not a template sitting unused in a drawer.
That platform secures its own infrastructure, but under the shared-responsibility model your firm still owns identity, access, device security and how the environment is configured. Most incidents trace back to those customer-side gaps — which is exactly what our layered protection closes.
Insurers and examiners now require enforced MFA, endpoint detection and response, tested backups and documented controls. We implement those layers and hand you the documentation to answer applications and exam requests accurately — often improving eligibility, premium and audit outcomes.
Yes. Through co-managed IT we extend your internal team and compliance function with specialized security expertise, after-hours coverage and the documentation your regulators expect — without replacing the people who already know your firm.
Your technology should be your firm’s strongest safeguard, not its weakest link. North Star can assess your current environment against the layers above, show you exactly where the gaps are, move you to a secure cloud-first foundation, and manage it as a long-term partner through our managed security services.
Contact North Star today to schedule a security review for your Denver, Colorado Springs or Fort Collins financial firm.