This week on That Tech Pod, healthcare cybersecurity gets a reality check. Ed Gaudet, Founder and CEO of Censinet, joins the show to unpack how he found his way into healthcare security and why it became the problem he chose to focus on long term. From there, the conversation moves quickly past surface-level explanations and into where things actually break inside health systems.

It’s not a lack of tools. It’s not a lack of awareness. Ed lays out how leadership gaps, misaligned incentives, and day-to-day operational pressures create the conditions for breaches, even in organizations that believe they’re in good shape. He also shares how he would test that assumption and what signals tell you whether a system is truly secure or just hoping it is. The episode digs into the tension between patient care and security, questioning whether it’s a real constraint or sometimes a convenient reason to avoid harder decisions. On the AI front, Ed separates what’s actually working from what’s getting too much credit, and highlights the parts of a breach that technology alone won’t fix. It wraps with a candid look at the hard truths the industry tends to avoid and what real accountability would look like if organizations took cybersecurity seriously.

Then stick around to the very end for a bonus poem that adds an unexpected close to the conversation.

Ed Gaudet is the Founder and CEO of Censinet, a company focused on healthcare cybersecurity and third-party risk management. With more than 25 years of software and technology leadership experience, Ed has held executive roles spanning product, marketing, and sales at companies including Imprivata, Liquid Machines, IONA Technologies, Rational Software, and SQA, Inc. At Imprivata, he served as CMO and later business unit GM, leading the creation of Imprivata Cortext, a cloud-based clinical communications platform recognized as best-in-KLAS. Ed holds multiple patents in mobile authentication, secure content sharing, and distributed data management, and he is a recognized speaker on leadership, healthcare, and regulatory compliance.

On this week's episode of That Tech Pod, we sit down with Michel Langlois, a longtime engineering leader whose career spans the rise of modern networking, from scaling Cisco’s IOS platform to leading as CTO at Calix. He joins us to cut through the noise around AI in network security and talk about what’s actually happening under the hood.

We get into how AI is actually being used inside modern networks, replacing work that once depended on experienced engineers, and where it’s truly improving operations versus where it’s still overhyped. That naturally raises the bigger question: is AI making network engineers better, or starting to replace parts of the role? We also explore the growing risk to telecom and broadband infrastructure, how exposed access networks really are, and whether the industry is taking those threats seriously enough, along with whether AI is reducing alert fatigue or just creating smarter noise. To close, Michel shares lessons from decades of building and leading engineering teams, including how to keep AI efforts focused on real outcomes instead of endless experimentation, and what it takes to actually bring these technologies into production at scale.

Michel Langlois has spent nearly four decades at the center of network innovation, helping scale some of the most important software platforms in modern connectivity. At Cisco Systems, he helped build and lead the global IOS engineering organization as the company grew from a $1B business to more than $40B. At Juniper Networks, he overhauled Junos software development to improve speed, quality, and scale. And during a decade as CTO at Calix, he helped reshape the company’s product strategy and engineering culture, contributing to a fourfold increase in revenue and a tenfold jump in market cap.
Today, Langlois advises CEOs and boards during key growth inflection points, helping companies scale without breaking their engineering core. A Forbes Tech Council contributor and author of the Amazon bestseller Beyond the Code, he focuses on the intersection of AI-driven networking, cloud transformation, and organizational design.

This week Laura and Kevin sit down with Bruno Lecoq, CEO of BEMO, to talk about the reality of cybersecurity for small and mid-sized defense contractors. Bruno shares how he ended up leading a cybersecurity company and why smaller organizations, especially those connected to the defense supply chain, have become some of the most attractive targets for attackers. The conversation challenges the common belief that hackers only focus on big-name companies and instead explains what’s actually happening on the ground for organizations with 50 to 100 employees.

From there, we dig into the difference between security theater and real protection. Bruno explains why fear-driven compliance advice often leads companies to spend more money without meaningfully reducing risk, who benefits from that cycle, and where organizations tend to invest in tools that look impressive but don’t actually stop breaches. We also get into practical issues leaders overlook, like admin access and identity controls, which are often the simplest path into a company network. We wrap with a candid look at real-world constraints. If a company passes every audit but still gets breached, what does that say about compliance frameworks like CMMC, SOC 2, and NIST SP 800-171? And looking ahead, Bruno weighs in on what’s more likely to cause damage over the next five years: sophisticated AI-powered attacks or companies continuing to ignore the basic security controls that stop most breaches today.

Bruno Lecoq is the CEO of BEMO and a trusted voice in cybersecurity compliance for US-based small and mid-sized defense contractors. He works hands-on with business owners, IT leaders, and executives to turn complex regulatory frameworks into practical, achievable compliance outcomes. With deep expertise across CMMC, SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and NIST 800, Bruno is known for his calm, implementation-first approach. Rather than promoting fear or over-engineered solutions, he helps organizations align compliance requirements with the tools, processes, and systems they already use, particularly within Microsoft environments.