At school James Robinson was more sporty than STEM, but after school he rose from the track to cybersecurity leader at Netskope.
The journey to becoming a CISO
The young James Robinson attended a small high school in Central Illinois and describes himself as ‘more sporty than STEM’: “I wasn’t going to knock it out of the park in the English class – but luckily the English teacher was also the track coach, so that helped.” In his final year in high school, the principal suggested going on to something vocational or trades-related rather than university. A friend was already in a vocational school doing electronics engineering, so he went that route. That school had just been included in the Cisco Networking Academy (NetAcad).
Robinson threw himself into NetAcad learning. “It was like the world suddenly became my oyster. There was no stopping me. I started doing networking at home, got connected to the internet, and studied and studied.” This was the late 1990s while he was still at school.
After school, by the early 2000s, he became a network engineer at State Farm Insurance, but now with a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) certification. He decided to join Cisco itself. At that time, Cisco was the darling of the tech boom, briefly being the most valuable company in the world with a market cap in excess of $500 billion.
But then the dot-com bubble burst. It would not be a stretch to say that Cisco was caught flat-footed. Its stock price plummeted from over $80 to under $10, and the firm was forced to lay off around 8,500 employees.
For Robinson, that route to Cisco was blocked and he was forced to remain at State Farm Insurance. He asked for a different position, and was told, ‘This security thing is going to be big. Go for that.’ While doing the interviews at Cisco, he had met a guy from AT&T who had talked about the idea of shutting off internet connection and all outside communications for security reasons, so this new security idea gelled.
Robinson was in his early 20s and looking for a new direction and new challenge. In his own words, “I just kind of fell into security. I saw the opportunity, took the shot, and went for it.” He became a technical (security) analyst at State Farm Insurance.
The combination of a solid background in technology, networking and an early and growing interest in security was a solid marketable quality. In 2006 he left State Farm Insurance to become a systems engineer (info protection security architecture and analysis) at Anheuser-Busch. He moved on to Emerson Electric in 2008 and became product security assurance manager and product security officer at Emerson Network Power in 2010. In 2012 he joined Websense and became security architecture and strategy officer in 2013. He then moved to Accuvant-FishNet Security as director of information security, becoming VP of third-party risk management at Optiv in 2015.
Always in security, never staying long in any one position, but always moving up the career ladder. In 2018 he joined Netskope as deputy CISO. He seems to have found his calling. He stayed in that position for more than five years – twice his average sojourn – and became CISO in 2024. He remains CISO at Netskope today.
Advice
Every successful person has had good advice along the way. That advice is often useful to everyone, not just security practitioners.
On his journey, Robinson received and followed the advice of numerous mentors. One was his mother-in-law. “If you want to do something,” she told him, “and you keep getting blowback or being told, ‘You don’t want to do that because…’ then you’re probably not right for that position, or company, or even that career anymore.”
He also had traditional professional mentors and tries to live by one specific piece of advice: “Get close to the business. Understand how the business works. Know what makes it perform well and what makes it perform poorly.”