Unlocking the Future: Why Now's the Time to Prepare for the Quantum Computing Revolution

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The Quantum Computing Era is Upon Us: Prepare Now or Face the Consequences

For years, the threat of quantum computing has been looming on the horizon, but its impact was thought to be years away. However, the landscape has shifted dramatically, and the future is now. Guidance from leading organizations such as NIST, CISA, and Gartner has transitioned from gentle warnings to urgent alerts. The time to prepare for the quantum computing era is now.

According to NIST

The transition to a secure quantum computing era will require a long-term, collaborative effort between government and industry. The agency advises organizations to begin their quantum computing journey as soon as possible. By 2029, quantum computers are expected to break traditional RSA and ECC encryption, which underpins the internet. Sophisticated attackers are already exploiting this vulnerability, collecting encrypted data in anticipation of future advances that will render current protections obsolete.

Nation-State Actors and Ransomware Groups

Nation-state actors are harvesting encrypted communications and sensitive data, betting that future quantum computers will be able to crack the encryption. Ransomware groups are also exfiltrating encrypted backups and archives, knowing that weak key governance, identity exposure, or cryptographic decay can turn inaccessible data into future leverage.

The Quantum Computing Threat

The threat posed by quantum computing is not just theoretical; it’s real and imminent. The industry’s approach to post-quantum migration is often presented as a linear process: inventory, prioritize, and migrate. However, building a cryptographic inventory is a daunting task, especially at scale. Traditional discovery tools are insufficient, as they only scan networks for public certificates and miss the complex reality of modern infrastructure.

The Challenge of Visibility

Most security teams lack visibility into the cryptographic keys and libraries used by their systems. They don’t know what keys and libraries are crypto-capable or what their systems actually use. This lack of visibility makes it difficult to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities.

A New Approach: Identity-Centric Security

To address this challenge, security teams need to shift their focus from treating cryptography as a math problem to treating it as an identity problem. Cryptographic credentials are always attached to something: a person, server, bot, or application. By mapping identities, security teams can contextualize risk, solve the “who owns this?” mystery, and catch machines that are often missed by traditional scanners.

The Benefits of Identity-Centric Security

This identity-centric approach can make post-quantum migration manageable. It provides a contextual map of the environment, allowing security teams to triage and prioritize vulnerabilities. By linking certificates to identities, security teams can see which ones belong to critical systems and which ones can be ignored.

The Cost of Waiting

Gartner compares the post-quantum migration to Y2K, but this analogy falls short. Y2K had a fixed deadline and a known bug, whereas post-quantum migration has a moving deadline and requires replacing the foundation of trust in our systems. Delaying migration by another year only narrows our options and turns a decade of accumulated cryptographic and identity debt into a compressed, high-risk sprint.

The Urgency of Preparation

The quantum era will arrive soon, whether we’re ready or not. Security teams must start looking at identities, not just certificates. Encryption and digital signatures are not one-time controls; they are systems that require continuous governance through strong identity assurance, disciplined key management, and crypto agility. The time to prepare is now.