Bob founded West Strategy Group after more than 25 years in security leadership roles with financial and professional services organizations.

Bob has a unique combination of leading enterprise cybersecurity teams, providing consulting services to technology companies and enterprise cybersecurity leaders and advised and has been a member of cybersecurity product companies. This allows him to provide multiple perspectives to his clients.

Previously, Bob was chief security officer for Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Cloud division. Prior to Palo Alto Networks, Bob was a managing director in Deloitte’s cyber risk services practice, where he was part of the leadership team responsible for growing the business. Prior to Deloitte, Bob was managing director and CISO for York Risk Services. Prior to these roles, Bob was Chief Trust Officer at CipherCloud, where he was responsible for working across the company’s business divisions, customer base and partner ecosystem to evangelize the importance of cloud data protection. Prior to CipherCloud, Bob was CEO at Echelon One, an information security consulting and research firm. Prior to Echelon One, Bob was Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Fifth Third Bank in Cincinnati where he was responsible for the enterprise information security strategy. Prior to joining Fifth Third, Bob worked for Bank One in Columbus where he held several key leadership roles, including Information Security Officer for Bank One's Retail Group. Prior to joining Bank One, Bob was a manager with Ernst & Young’s Information Security Services practice in Chicago, and a Senior Systems Officer with Citicorp International in New York and Chicago.

Bob is on the board of directors for the USA Track and Field Foundation and on vArmour, Cyberhaven and Cyera’s advisory boards. He has been on the advisory board the Hispanic IT Executive Council (HITEC), the board of management for the Jericho Forum, the advisory boards for the Agiliance, AirPatrol (acquired by Sysorex), CipherCloud, Securent (acquired by Cisco), TriCipher (acquired by VMWare), Trusteer (acquired by IBM), The University of Detroit Mercy’s College of Liberal Arts and Education and a member of RSA Security’s Customer Advisory Council and the ISS Customer Advisory Council.

Bob received the 2022 and 2024 HITEC 100 award, the 2004 Digital ID World Conference award for Balancing Innovation and Reality, a 2004 InfoWorld 100 Award for implementing SAML and was a nominee for the ISC2 Senior Information Security Professional of the Year, 2011. Bob graduated from Michigan State University with a Bachelor of Arts in German and then received his Master of Science in Management Information Systems from North Central College.