Edge of Excellence: Empowering People to Shape the Future

What do you do when your career is upended at the worst possible moment?

For Justin Peavey, the dot-com crash left him with a newborn son and no income. He used that time to study, refocus and commit to information security. That decision launched a 20-year career as a Chief Information Security Officer. Today he is Partner & Senior Managing Director and Chief Risk Officer & CISO Emeritus at Wellington Management.

In this episode of Edge of Excellence, Bryon Beilman reconnects with Justin, his former colleague of roughly 25 years. Justin explains why the CISO job has become almost unrecognizable every seven years. He also traces the pattern every major technology shift follows, from open systems to the public cloud to AI. He shares why defending against machine-speed AI attacks now requires AI-powered detection, and why cybersecurity is best understood as a business risk rather than a technology problem.

The conversation then turns to practical career advice. Justin explains how anyone can build an enterprise-grade security lab in the cloud for little or no money. He describes what he looks for when hiring, and why personal projects often say more than credentials. He closes with a lesson for every leader: don’t anchor yourself to a title, and make room for the people you’ve developed to grow.

Connect with Justin on LinkedIn, and find more episodes at iuvotech.com.

Before your business invests in AI, ask a harder question: are you actually ready?

In this episode of Edge of Excellence, Jess DeForge and Bryon Beilman sit down again with Matt Freake, VP of Client Services at iuvo. They discuss what separates AI experimentation from AI that delivers real value. Matt draws on his experience building AI tools at iuvo and training client teams. He covers the foundation most organizations skip: securing data through enterprise agreements, setting guardrails that protect the business without stifling experimentation, and running a readiness assessment before rolling out tools like Microsoft Copilot.

The conversation also covers the new reality of non-developers building software with AI. Matt explains why practices like a software development lifecycle, centralized code repositories, and secure cloud hosting now matter to businesses that never considered themselves software companies. He shares his approach to AI training, which starts with the tasks employees like least. He also explains why measuring success by adoption alone falls short once costs come into view.

Matt closes with his advice for a CEO ready to get serious about AI: understand the business and its pain points, lead adoption from the top by sharing wins, and put the right security and use policies in place from the start.

Learn more about iuvo's AI readiness and consulting services at iuvotech.com.

Technium has done one thing for 27 years and deliberately refused to do anything else.

Michael Joseph, Co-Founder and CEO of Technium, joins Jess DeForge and Bryon Beilman to explain why focus is a strategy rather than a limitation. Technium designs, builds, and operates the networks behind some of the Northeast's most data-intensive organizations, including the Markley data center fabric in Boston.

Michael walks through the three principles the company was built on in 1998: a true 24/7 operations center, a culture of training rather than poaching, and security built in from day one. He explains how one conversation with Moderna's first CIO — "I want no servers, how do I build for that?" — opened the door to Boston's life sciences market, and how a low-key community event called Peers and Beers became the company's most effective go-to-market motion.

He also breaks down what a network fabric actually is in plain language, including how one client saw Microsoft 365 traffic accelerate 56%, how it differs from Microsoft Fabric, and why the ROI case is easier to make to a business owner than to an IT team.

Bryon and Michael have used each other as CEO sounding boards since the earliest days of COVID. They talk candidly about why running a company is lonely, why "I can't get fired, but I also can't quit" changes how you show up every day, and what to look for in a peer relationship if you're early in your own founder journey.

In this episode:
- Why Technium refused to expand its service menu
- Building a true 24/7 operation across Europe and Asia
- Experience density, and hiring for people who want to learn
- Why "connectivity" lands better than "networking"
- The 2 a.m. story every business owner understands
- Moderna, the biotech blueprint, and a bet on life sciences
- Building community instead of chasing leads
- Building female leadership in a field that's 97% male

Learn more about Technium: https://techniumnetworking.com

The Edge of Excellence is hosted by Jess DeForge and Bryon Beilman of iuvo, a Boston-based transformative IT consulting firm. Watch the full video episode on YouTube, and find more at https://iuvotech.com

Most leaders can tell you their IT environment feels messy. Far fewer can tell you why.

In this episode, Jess DeForge and Bryon Beilman are joined by Derek Murphy, Senior Consultant at iuvo, for a conversation about what a strategic IT assessment actually reveals, and why it's a business review, not a hardware inventory.

Derek has spent more than 20 years in IT, eight of them at iuvo, working across software, biotech, EDA, and financial services environments. He walks through how technical debt accumulates quietly over 12 to 18 months, why an environment can run smoothly and still carry serious hidden risk, and what gets uncovered once someone starts asking the right questions: dormant privileged accounts, permissions nobody has audited since 2019, documentation that lives in one engineer's head, duplicate tools bought on a credit card, and Microsoft 365 licenses that can quietly cost six figures a year.

They also get into the parts leaders don't expect. Why an assessment matters more if you already have an in-house IT team, not less. Why an acquisition, IPO, or cyber insurance renewal should trigger one. How unaudited access controls turn into data leakage the moment you roll out AI. And Derek's blunt take on backups that aren't actually backups.

The through line: an assessment isn't about finding fault. It's about replacing "we think we're fine" with an answer you can plan and budget against.

Ready for a clearer picture of your environment? Request a complimentary IT assessment at iuvotech.com.

Cloud costs rarely get out of control because of one big decision. More often, they're the result of small decisions that accumulate: forgotten resources, over-provisioned environments, inefficient architectures, unclear ownership, and a lack of governance.

In this episode of Edge of Excellence, Jessica and Bryon are joined by Brian O'Neill, Principal Consultant at iuvo, for a practical conversation about cloud cost management, AWS and Azure spend, and cloud governance.

Brian explains why the ease and flexibility of the cloud can also make it surprisingly easy to spend money without realizing it. From forgotten development environments and oversized databases to running workloads 24/7 that don't need to be, the conversation explores some of the most common sources of unnecessary cloud spend.

The episode also dives into right-sizing, scaling, tagging, account and subscription structures, Infrastructure as Code, budgets, alerts, and governance guardrails, and how organizations can implement these practices without slowing down the teams that depend on cloud resources.

You'll hear a real-world example of how identifying unused and over-provisioned resources helped a client save roughly $50,000, as well as why some workloads may actually be more cost-effective to run outside of the cloud.  

Brian's central message is simple: you need to know what exists in your cloud environment, what it's doing, who owns it, and why you're paying for it. Effective cloud governance isn't about putting up barriers, it's about creating guardrails that give teams freedom while keeping costs, security, and the overall environment under control. 

If your organization is managing AWS or Azure and wondering whether you're spending more than you should, this episode offers practical ideas for where to look and how to start.

Topics covered include:

•  AWS and Azure cost optimization 
•  Cloud cost management 
•  Cloud governance 
•  Right-sizing cloud resources 
•  Cloud architecture 
•  Lift-and-shift migrations 
•  AWS tagging and Azure subscriptions 
•  Shadow IT 
•  Infrastructure as Code 
•  Cloud budgets and alerts 
•  Cloud security 
•  Cloud scalability 
•  DevOps and governance 
•  When to bring in cloud consulting expertise 
•  When cloud may not be the right choice for a workload 

Learn more about iuvo

Most organizations already own Microsoft Copilot. Far fewer know what to do with it.

Brian St. Marie, iuvo's VP of Technology, says Copilot adoption is now the single most common AI conversation he has and it's the same conversation whether the company has fifteen employees or several thousand. In this episode, Bryon Beilman and Jess DeForge dig into why that is, and what to do about it.

The conversation covers the free Copilot access already included with every Microsoft 365 license and what it does and doesn't reach; why adoption and governance are two separate problems that stall each other when treated as one; the SharePoint permissions and data hygiene issues that surface the moment Copilot can search your tenant; and why top-down AI mandates and usage leaderboards tend to backfire.

Brian and Bryon also get practical about measurement, the adoption data Microsoft already gives you, what leaders should be asking for, and how to think about ROI on an investment whose target keeps moving. The episode closes on the most common mistake Brian sees: organizations that skip governance at the start, then discover where their data has been going.

IT leaders often have a seat at the executive table. But are they truly being heard?

In this episode of Edge of Excellence, Jess DeForge and Bryon Beilman speak with Phil Howard about what it takes for CIOs, CTOs, IT Directors, VPs of IT, and technology leaders to move from being treated like the “Department of IT” to becoming strategic business voices.

Phil brings experience across sales training, telecom, consulting, vendor-neutral advisory, podcasting, and hundreds of conversations with IT leaders. Together, the group explores why technical leaders can understand the full complexity of the business and still struggle to communicate value in a way executives understand.

The conversation covers executive buy-in, vendor pressure, cost control, mid-market IT complexity, business communication, defensible technology decisions, and why IT is often invisible when things work but treated as a cost center when leadership does not understand the value behind the systems.

This episode is especially relevant for IT leaders, business executives, consultants, service providers, and mid-market organizations that want technology to be more strategically aligned with business outcomes.

At its core, this is a conversation about communication, trust, leadership maturity, and helping IT leaders become heard, respected, and involved before critical technology decisions are already made.

Learn more about iuvo by visiting www.iuvotech.com

Connect with Phil Howard 

Check out the You've Been Heard Podcast 

Early technology decisions can shape how easily a company grows later.

In this episode of Edge of Excellence, iuvo's Jessica DeForge and Bryon Beilman speak with Ian Findlay, Partner in TechCXO’s Product & Technology practice, about technology debt, IT strategy, and the value of fractional CIO guidance for growing companies.

Ian shares how startups and small to mid-sized businesses often make technology decisions based on what is familiar, fast, or inexpensive in the moment. Those decisions may work when a company has five people, but they can become painful to unwind when the organization is preparing for funding, hiring quickly, expanding operations, or trying to reduce risk.

The conversation explores how early IT choices affect security, collaboration, infrastructure, cloud platforms, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace environments, device management, documentation, and overall business readiness. Ian also explains how IT health assessments help leadership teams understand where they stand and how fractional CIO support can give growing companies senior technology guidance without requiring a full-time executive hire.

This episode is especially relevant for founders, CEOs, COOs, CFOs, biotech and life sciences leaders, startup teams, and business leaders who want to build a stronger technology foundation before growth creates pressure.

What does it take to build a global supply chain company from a basement prototype? Krenar Komoni, CEO and founder of Tive, joins Jess DeForge and Bryon Beilman for a candid conversation about a career that has been anything but linear.

Krenar shares the pivots, near-failures, and defining moments behind Tive, now on track for $100M in revenue and growing at 50% annually. From designing wireless chips in Boston to watching his father-in-law struggle with outdated logistics tools, he traces the winding path that led to one of the fastest-growing supply chain visibility companies in the world.

In this episode, Krenar talks about getting the entrepreneurship bug at 16 while helping launch a TV station in Kosovo, the bottom-up management lesson he learned as a junior engineer that he still uses as CEO, why almost every early assumption about Tive's market was wrong, the $10,000-in-the-bank moment that cemented his conviction, and what Tive actually tracks.

If you're a founder, operator, or anyone navigating a path that doesn't follow a straight line, this one is worth your time.

Learn more about Tive at tive.com and connect with Krenar on LinkedIn. Visit iuvotech.com for more Edge of Excellence episodes.

Imposter syndrome is not rare. It is just often quiet.

In this episode of Edge of Excellence, Jess DeForge and Bryon Beilman are joined by iuvo team members Derek Murphy and Ken Hillstrom for an honest, relatable conversation about imposter syndrome, self-doubt, high performance, and growth.

They explore how imposter feelings show up during career transitions, leadership moments, high-pressure work, and periods of rapid change. The conversation also looks at the role leaders play in creating cultures where people feel psychologically safe to learn, ask questions, make mistakes, and continue growing.

This episode is for high performers, emerging leaders, managers, culture builders, and anyone who has ever felt like everyone else has it figured out.

You do not need to eliminate imposter feelings to succeed. You need the right support, the right environment, and the confidence to keep moving forward anyway.

To learn more about iuvo visit iuvotech.com