This week we continue to explore Security and Virtual CISO, with special guest Paul Robinson, National Sales Director of IGI. Transcript was auto-generated, some errors may be present Josh Lupresto (00:02):

Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level Biztech. Hey everybody. Welcome back. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of sales engineering here at Telarus, and this is the Next Level Biztech podcast. Today. We are talking security, but more importantly, we are talking about virtual CISO chief information security officer. And today we have the pleasure of being joined by my good friend, Paul Robinson, who is VP of national sales at IGI cyber security. Paul, welcome on my man,

Paul Robinson (00:56):

Josh, thank you so much. Just looking forward to having our normal conversations and sharing it to the masses. Really excited for this man.

Josh Lupresto (01:04):

So I, I want everybody to get to know Paul any, anything cool you have about, you know, your background or weird or normal or whatever? I, I always love hearing how people got into the roles, we're gonna get into who IGI is and what your role is. But, but how about getting here? Were you always security? Did you switch, you know, what's the story?

Paul Robinson (01:25):

Oh man. It, it is a weird story. So I'm gonna shock a lot of people that are listening to this at Nomi. My start actually started with telecom and selling WebEx and conference call services back in the early two thousands. When you call on fortune 100 companies and they'd say, yeah, we're never gonna use WebEx. We're gonna put people on planes for the rest of our duration here. And lo and behold everything had changed. So did that for a while and then went into healthcare. Healthcare management for a couple of years, kind of got bogged down with that. I'm like, nah, I like technology. I like, you know, telecom and things of that nature. So joined a company locally here in Rochester and within a week they said, Hey, we're changing the whole business model to cybersecurity. And this is in October of 2009.

Paul Robinson (02:13):

So I was like yeah, I, I know a little bit about antivirus that's on my computer and TJ max, that was the big reach that had just come out recently. Somebody's, I don't know. They're excited about my story back there, but but so TJ Maxx just came out, so that was kind of mainstream news and, and whatever. So I was like, okay, take a, take a switch. And it's been history ever since. Cybersecurity has allowed me to meet some of the, the world's greatest cybersecurity minds and world's greatest risk minds. And it was a weird path to get here, but I feel, you know, for the last 14 years, I've, I've found what my career calling is and that's to use cybersecurity and risk risk services to help out people

Josh Lupresto (03:00):

Love it. I, I love that very rarely is there just this linear path. And I think that teaches you so much too, right? You just, you learn it the hard way. And you know that you wanna do something in your general area, but you don't really know what always your general area is. So I love to, to hear somebody that landed on something different. That's awesome. Yeah.

Paul Robinson (03:20):

We inherently, we all wanna be great at something like, I think that's inherent in all of us and, and whether it is, you know, being a garbage man or being in cybersecurity or being a doc, like we just have that innate thing of just wanting to be great at something and to latch onto something and have a purpose. And that's how cybersecurity fell for me.

Josh Lupresto (03:38):

So let's jump in then current role VP of national sales at IGI I wanna preface with IGI was one of the very early security providers of Telarus. And it's been awesome to, to work with you as you guys have grown as we've g...