AMHERST, N.Y. — Global Security IQ is a full service cybersecurity business headquartered in Amherst, New York.

Former federal agent Holly Hubert is the CEO. Hubert said when the coronavirus pandemic hit, her company was at an advantage.

"Because we are a fundamentally, we're in the information technology business, we were able to very quickly work remotely," she said. "We were able to pivot."

But the pandemic also had a significant impact on the types of business the company did. Pre-COVID, Global Security IQ did a lot of proactive work with companies, identifying vulnerabilities in their networks and hardening them.

"We just haven't seen a lot of that during COVID because that tends to be sort of disposable money," Hubert said.

As other companies began to have their employees work from home though, it created new vulnerabilities in networks. All of a sudden, Hubert and her employees began responding to a lot more breaches.

"There's been a lot of threats, foreign threats, some domestic threats of intruders that are actually preying upon kind of a lessened security posture by working from home," she said.

Hubert said she would prefer to be doing the proactive work instead of the reactive work, but she realizes that's just not the reality right now.

She said as the economy recovers, companies should consider hardening their networks because the pandemic has fundamentally changed the American office.

"I think what COVID did to us is it taught the world that work from home is probably a thing that will never go away. It helped us refine business processes. It helped us create efficiencies," she said. "It helped us leverage technology to do our jobs."