Like most cybersecurity professionals, James Robinson came into his career almost by accident.
It started in the 1990s. Robinson grew up in rural Illinois where there was more farmland than corporate parking lots. His interests were cars, stereos, and sports, and thought his future was in athletics. But two concussions after two weeks playing high school football quickly disrupted that plan.
So he turned to a surprising new love: computer networking. Robinson’s high school offered an opportunity to take courses through Cisco’s Networking Academy, a program that teaches networking and technical skills.
“I just found myself in a spot where I could go for it and I kind of just fell in love with it overnight,” said Robinson, chief information security officer at Netskope, a cloud security company.
Robinson sees his cybersecurity career as a series of opportunities. When one door closed, another opened—often with a mentor to guide the way. Thinking like a hacker and figuring out how a complex system worked and improving it is his strategy for protecting Netskope from threats.
While finishing up high school, Robinson also took a part-time job at State Farm. But this job had less to do with insurance, and was instead focused on maintaining the infrastructure of one of the largest privately-owned computer networks at the time.
Robinson maintained a lab at State Farm where he learned about networking. His job was to tear apart and fix the dizzying amount of technical equipment at the company, transforming him from a technical novice to a seasoned hacker without even realizing it.
During the early 2000s, Robinson said cybersecurity, as an industry, was burgeoning and careers in technology tended to focus on software development, computer science, or computer networking. But he was convinced by a mentor at State Farm to continue with cybersecurity.
Robinson took an “eyes wide open” approach to his corporate and cybersecurity career. “I came from a farm kid background, I wasn’t necessarily from a corporate ladder family,” Robinson said. He felt like he had a lot to learn, and he considers his next job to be a “pivotal point” in his career.
Emerson Network Power, now called Vertiv, provided power supply technologies to data centers. There, Robinson’s experience grew as he dove into the world of global software development, which he described as “software engineering as a manufacturing process.” He also grew as a person. “I was a very very introverted individual up until about 12 years into my career,” Robinson said. “I really didn’t like speaking in public groups.”
His push came from a mentor and family friend. Robinson was sitting in a meeting with that person, who was supposed to lead, before he suddenly made an excuse to leave and announced, “James is going to run this meeting.”
“I was like, ‘I don’t like this at all,'” Robinson said. But thanks to that moment, he started learning how to voice his opinions, take the lead on projects, and embrace leadership qualities.
Alongside his personal trajectory, his technical path continued as well. He now holds 11 patents, related to networking and cybersecurity, with the latest issued last month. Robinson said he realized early on that companies appreciate patents.
He also realized the benefits of building cybersecurity into power supply products at Emerson. Instead of just focusing on protecting the corporate network, he suggested that the security team also ensure the products themselves are secure. Robinson said that customers appreciated the security benefits because it created an increased “trust factor.”
One of his next stops was at the web security company Websense, where Robinson said he really began figuring out how to “do security inside of a security company.”
After Websense, he went to another security company, Accuvant, where he helped security leaders at other organizations beef up their digital defenses. Accuvant eventually merged with another company to form what would become Optiv. There, Robinson decided to do more internal security. He grew tired of helping chief information security officers, or CISOs, with improving their cybersecurity defenses only to come back a few years later to see regression. He wanted to get back to being a practitioner.
In 2018 he joined Netskope as the deputy chief information security officer. Robinson saw his job as keeping as much off the plate of the CISO as much as possible. Robinson said a CISO without a full plate can spend more time opening “up the doors for the security program” to become more involved in the business.
“Our attack surface is always evolving. It’s always moving,” Robinson said.
Now six months into his role as CISO at Netskope, he said the role is a lot of strategy, budgeting, and guiding the direction of the security.
One of the exciting things about being a CISO working at a cybersecurity firm is they get to test the latest security products developed internally. Basically, he gets first dibs at some of the latest cybersecurity technologies and can even shape the direction of product development.
“When I joined here, I was the fourth person on the security team at that time,” Robinson said. “Now, if you include all the members of the security program we’re in the hundreds.”