Former Doncaster town centre waitress plans to re-locate hi-tech firm she created from London to her home town

But after building up a high tech business in London, she’s hoping to return to her home town – and bringing some new jobs with her.

Brought up in Wheatley, Ms Austen decided to leave her job at Relish, on East Laith Gate and go to university – and after studying digital forensics at Sheffield Hallam, she headed off to London.

She moved up in the world of cyber-security quickly, and last year set up a compay called th4ts3cur1ty.company with a business partner, Stephen Ridgeway.

Now they are looking to set up another brand doing similar work at a new set-up in her home town.

She said: “We are currently based in London, but as I am originally from Doncaster I wanted to create jobs and exciting career opportunities here. We are a cyber security company and have a cyber defence specific arm called PocketSIEM. It is PocketSIEM which we are moving to Doncaster.

The firm is a lower budget version of their London operation, which they intend to run using cheaper versions of services that still do what their customers need. It is expected to be popular with small to medium sized businesses.

They are currently looking for premises in Doncaster to base the new operations centre in, although lockdown has delayed the scheme.

“We would have created three jobs by now if it had not been for lockdown,” said Ms Austin, now aged 32. “Some customers have asked if they could deploy later this year.

“We are hoping to have created five by the back of 2020, and then a steady stream of six or seven a year for the foreseeable future.

“If people don’t have the skills, we want to train them up. We have our own training course that we’ve developed. Effectively, we teach our staff how to stop people from hacking computers. We also will need relationship managers who are customer facing, and sales staff.

“We are looking for a site that’s reasonably priced with parking. It has to be culturally right to bring this sort of jobs to Doncaster. I want to bring a tech start-up to Doncaster and experience that atmosphere.

“I’m from Doncaster, and these opportunities were not there when I was younger. We will hire people of any age if they’ve got the right skills and I don’t think London is the be all and end all for tech start-ups. If something like this had been here when I was younger, I would have bitten their hands off to work there.”

Ms Austin is now splitting her time between London and Bawtry. “I miss the quietness of Bawtry,” she said. “And I miss not being able to get out and see nature when I’m not in Doncaster.”

London based co-founder Stephen Ridgway admits that moving PocketSIEM out of London seemed risky to him at first.

He said: “One of the biggest challenges facing employers in cyber security, is finding and retaining talent. There is so much competition for employees, we have to think, why would someone with the skills already move to Doncaster? We then developed our own training program, tested it on the market and after the first course sold out, we thought, okay, we can develop the talent in the area natively. Rather than shift people around the country we will be developing it in-house alongside our experienced staff.”

They will not be the first tech firm in Doncaster. A number of computer age jobs firms are already based in the borough at various businesses.

For instance scores of staff work for the website MyPensionExpert.com at its base in the town centre, a former council office block on Duke street, as it has expanded massively since it was initially set up 10 years ago.