How Vivid Adapt partnered with global financial services firm Mariana Capital to transform their Microsoft Azure environment, elevate their cyber security posture beyond baseline compliance, and deliver direct access to elite IT expertise.
Founded in 2009 by experienced investment banking executives, Mariana Capital has evolved from a boutique brokerage into a globally diversified financial services powerhouse. The firm’s operational trajectory accelerated significantly following a highly successful strategic alliance with United First Partners, creating a unified entity dedicated to delivering first-rate client service across global financial markets. Today, the Mariana UFP Group employs over one hundred and fifty highly specialised professionals stationed across seven international financial hubs, including London, Paris, Geneva, New York, Singapore, Melbourne, and Dubai. From these locations, the firm provides its clients with seamless access to cash equities, equity derivatives, fixed income, and bespoke structured products, having raised in excess of one and a half billion pounds across its customised product range.
As a market-leading execution venue operating an Organised Trading Facility authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, Mariana Capital operates in a high-stakes, hyper-connected digital environment. Within the capital markets sector, fractions of a second matter, and data integrity is absolutely paramount. The firm relies heavily on sophisticated algorithmic models, proprietary market analytics, and complex regulatory reporting mechanisms to maintain its competitive advantage and regulatory standing. In such a rigorously regulated and fast-paced setting, the absolute reliability, uncompromising security, and operational cost-efficiency of their underlying technological infrastructure are fundamentally linked to their ongoing commercial success and their ability to safeguard their clients’ wealth.
Financial Agility Powered by Pragmatic IT Optimisation
Summary
- Executed a comprehensive transformation and daily optimisation of Mariana Capital’s Microsoft Azure resources, eradicating cloud waste and significantly improving the predictability and effective use of the firm’s IT budget.
- Raised the bar of the firm’s security architecture far beyond standard regulatory checklists, ensuring that highly sensitive algorithmic data, client information, and global trading systems remain proactively protected against sophisticated modern threats.
- Implemented a streamlined service delivery model allowing Mariana Capital’s internal IT team to bypass traditional, slow-moving helpdesks and liaise exclusively with Vivid Adapt’s senior technical experts, drastically reducing issue resolution times.
- Provided the internal IT department with the profound confidence that they possess an elite technical extension handling daily infrastructure management, enabling business leadership to see immediate, measurable improvements in operational resilience and delivered value.
The Challenge
For a diversified financial services firm operating an Organised Trading Facility and managing highly complex structured products, technology serves as the foundational lifeblood of the business. The firm’s proprietary market strategies, bespoke advisory data, and rapid execution platforms represent its core commercial valuation. Protecting this invaluable intellectual property while maintaining uninterrupted global connectivity is an absolute necessity, particularly under the increasingly stringent operational resilience guidelines mandated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
Mariana Capital’s internal IT team holds the immense responsibility of managing this highly complex, geographically dispersed technological environment. However, they found themselves severely hindered by the unacceptably slow responsiveness and limited technical depth of their previous Managed Service Provider. The firm was trapped in a largely reactive IT cycle, dealing with inconsistent operational costs and a frustrating lack of strategic visibility into long-term infrastructure planning.
The Solution
Vivid Adapt initiated the strategic partnership with a comprehensive, meticulously planned onboarding programme designed to assume the daily management of Mariana Capital’s IT infrastructure without disrupting ongoing global trading operations. Recognising the severe financial inefficiencies inherent in the existing cloud environment, Vivid Adapt’s technical specialists executed a deep transformation and continuous optimisation of Mariana Capital’s Microsoft Azure resources. This proactive, daily management strategy successfully eliminated redundant computational processes, right-sized virtual applications, and achieved a vastly superior utilisation of the firm’s IT budget, effectively transforming unpredictable cloud sprawl into a stable, highly performant financial asset.
Simultaneously, Vivid Adapt engineered a massive, structural upgrade to the financial institution’s defensive architecture. Understanding the severe regulatory landscape of the global financial sector, Vivid Adapt raised the bar for cyber security. This initiative was not merely a superficial exercise in compliance box-ticking to satisfy Financial Conduct Authority regulations; it was a fundamental hardening of the infrastructure to ensure that Mariana Capital’s critical trading systems, internal communications, and highly sensitive client data are robustly protected against advanced persistent threats.
