IT Services for Hedge Funds and Family Offices
A fund's IT has one grading period: market hours. Order management, market data terminals, the prime broker portal and the administrator's file transfers all have to work from the open to the close, and the people who depend on them are not patient. Around that sits a second audience, the allocators and insurers whose due diligence questionnaires ask exactly how administrator rights are controlled. NetSys provides IT services for hedge funds and family offices with both audiences in mind. Uptime is engineered for the trading day, and every questionnaire answer can be backed with evidence.
The short answer
NetSys provides IT services for hedge funds, family offices and emerging managers: 24/7 monitoring and a help desk that reaches an engineer during market hours, support for order and execution management systems, market data terminals and research platforms, privileged access management and privileged identity management so administrative rights are granted for a task and expire, multifactor authentication and conditional access across the firm, encrypted communications with counterparties, managed endpoint detection on every device, and immutable backups with a disaster recovery plan tested against a trading-day outage. We help operations teams answer investor and insurer due diligence questionnaires with evidence rather than assertions, and we support the Regulation S-P obligations that apply to registered managers. Client names never appear in our marketing. Agreements run month to month.
Sound familiar?
- An outage during market hours with an IT provider that answers by email
- Domain administrator rights held permanently by two people, one of whom left last year
- Investor due diligence questionnaires answered from memory and never the same way twice
- Market data terminals and research tools installed by whoever was nearest, with no record of what is licensed to whom
- A wire instruction from a fund administrator or counterparty that arrived through a compromised mailbox
- Family office principals using personal devices and email for matters that move real money
Uptime for the Trading Day
- 24/7 monitoring with an engineer on the line during market hours
- Redundant internet paths and failover tested outside trading hours
- Support for order management, execution and market data platforms in coordination with their vendors
- Change freezes around earnings, rebalances and month-end so nobody patches at the open
Privileged Access, Controlled
- Privileged access management: administrator rights granted per task, recorded and expiring
- Privileged identity management in Entra ID for cloud administration
- No shared administrator accounts and no standing domain admin on a laptop
- Access reviews on a schedule, with departures handled the same day
Due Diligence, Answered with Evidence
- Written policies covering access, incident response, business continuity and vendor risk
- Questionnaire answers mapped to controls that exist and can be shown
- Regulation S-P incident response and service provider oversight for registered managers
- Penetration testing on a schedule, with findings closed and documented
Continuity and Confidentiality
- Immutable backups of firm systems and Microsoft 365, with restores timed
- A disaster recovery plan built around continuing to trade rather than only recovering files
- Encrypted email and a secure file path for administrators, auditors and counsel
- Custom applications, including a CRM built for the desk, when off-the-shelf tools do not fit
IT services for a hedge fund facing an allocator's operational due diligence
A composite example of work we do, written so you can picture the first 90 days. It is not a specific client — our real, named engagements are in case studies.
An emerging manager with a small investment team and two operations staff had grown from a shared office into its own space without changing how IT worked. Both partners held permanent domain administrator rights on their daily accounts. The trading desk used two internet connections that had never been failed over on purpose. An institutional allocator's due diligence questionnaire asked for the firm's access control, incident response and business continuity policies, and the honest answer was a shrug.
- Privileged access management put in place: administrator rights separated from daily accounts, granted per task and logged
- Conditional access and multifactor authentication enforced across Microsoft 365, with unmanaged devices blocked from firm data
- Internet failover configured and tested on a weekend, with monitoring that pages an engineer before the desk notices
- Policies written for access, incident response, vendor oversight and continuity, each tied to a control that could be demonstrated
- A tabletop exercise walking the partners through a trading-day outage and a compromised mailbox
The questionnaire went back with policies and screenshots rather than promises. The desk did not notice the next carrier outage because failover took over. Administrator rights now exist for the length of a task and leave a record behind.
Hedge Funds & Family Offices IT FAQs
Do you provide IT services for hedge funds with fewer than ten people?
Yes. Emerging managers and small family offices are a large part of this practice. The exposure does not scale down with headcount: the same allocators, the same regulators and the same criminals target a five-person fund. The agreement covers monitoring, help desk, privileged access management, security, backups and continuity planning under one fee, and it grows as the firm adds seats.
What is privileged access management and why do allocators ask about it?
Privileged access management controls who can use administrator rights, for how long and with what record. Most breaches that turn serious do so because someone held standing administrator access that an attacker took over. Allocators and insurers ask about it because it is one of the clearest indicators of whether a firm's security is real. We implement it so administrator rights are requested, approved, time-limited and logged, and we include it in the standard agreement rather than as an add-on.
Can you support our order management system and market data terminals?
We support the workstations, network, identity and access around them and we coordinate with the platform vendors directly. Terminal moves, entitlements and new-hire setups are handled within maintenance windows that respect the trading day. We keep an inventory of what is installed and licensed to whom, which is usually the first thing a new operations head asks for.
How do you handle an outage during market hours?
Monitoring is designed to catch it first. Redundant internet paths fail over automatically, and an engineer is reachable by phone rather than a ticket form. Changes are frozen around known sensitive periods, so the outage is not one we caused. If a workstation dies at the open, a spare is imaged and ready, and the trader is back on a machine while the old one is examined.
Do family offices need the same controls as a registered fund?
The regulatory obligations differ, but the money movement is often larger and the attackers know it. A family office moving funds among trusts, custodians and advisers on the principal's say-so is a prime target for impersonation and mailbox compromise. Multifactor authentication, verification procedures, managed devices and privileged access control matter at least as much, and many insurers now require them before writing coverage.
Do you require a long-term contract?
No. Hedge fund and family office agreements are month to month. Funds in launch mode often start with a defined build project and move to ongoing support once the desk is live. Nothing in the agreement ties the fund to a term, which is a question allocators sometimes ask about vendors too.
Guides for hedge funds & family offices leaders
Services behind this work
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