A YORK businessman is set to help tackle one of the biggest and fastest growing problems facing IT security experts around the world.

Thomas MacKenzie, from Clifton, has secured $500,000 in seed funding for RankedRight, a new platform enabling them to prioritise the vulnerabilities posing the greatest risks.

A spokeswoman said the former Easingwold School and York College student and his colleagues, Peter Yeo and Kristan Bullett, had developed a triage system following an IT security team’s pre-set rules to automate the time-consuming - yet crucial - process of ranking vulnerabilities in order of their impact to the business.

“With teams reportedly wasting an average of 76 per cent of their day remediating low priority risks, RankedRight enables them to divert their attention towards tackling the most critical issues and keep the company safe,”she said.

“Securing $500,000 in funding from a number of private investors, Thomas believes he has identified a credible solution to the known gap in vulnerability management - an estimated £9.3bn market opportunity.”

She said that before setting up RankedRight, Thomas had studied at Northumbria University and then joined Visa and NCC Group, before becoming an associate partner and vulnerability management specialist at IBM.

Peter had close to a decade of experience in technology, most recently holding the title of VP of Operations at a cyber security education start-up that was acquired in July 2017, and Kristan had 20 years experience in senior technical and strategic leadership positions building solutions for organisations such as BSkyB and Channel 4.

Thomas said: “We have a solution to one of the biggest and fastest growing problems facing information security teams across the world and I’m so proud that we can develop it right here in York. The north presents so many incredible opportunities for new businesses.”