Insights · Quantum readiness

Quantum Risk Is a Business Risk. Why Is It Still on the Back Burner?

A packed CISO roundtable showed the interest is there. The action isn’t. Treating post-quantum migration as a problem for later, or one your vendors will solve, is becoming a major oversight that leaders will have to defend.

On November 5, I spoke at a CyberRisk Alliance CISO roundtable in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a fireside chat on crypto-agility and the move to post-quantum cryptography. In a year when every security conversation seems to be about AI, I expected a modest turnout. Instead, the room filled. Security leaders clearly want to understand what quantum computing means for the encryption their businesses depend on.

But when the conversation turned to what they were actually doing about it, the picture changed.

What I heard

Three themes came up again and again:

• AI is consuming the attention and the budget. Quantum risk feels important but distant, so it keeps slipping down the list.
• Post-quantum work is low on the implementation list. Most organizations have discussed it; few have funded it.
• Many are waiting on their third parties. Much of their cryptography lives inside vendor products, so the instinct is to wait for vendors to upgrade first.

All three are understandable. Together, they add up to a risk that’s easy to underestimate.

Why waiting is riskier than it looks

The threat isn’t only in the future. Attackers can copy encrypted data today and decrypt it once a capable quantum computer exists. This is known as “harvest now, decrypt later.” Any data that must stay confidential for years, such as health records, financial data, intellectual property and legal material, is already exposed if it travels over connections protected by today’s public-key encryption.

The timelines are also moving earlier. Google and Cloudflare have both set 2029 as their own migration deadlines, and estimates of the computing power needed to break today’s encryption keep falling. Meanwhile, industry surveys put average post-quantum readiness at about 25 out of 100.

Due care and due diligence

This is the point I made in the room, and it’s worth repeating. Security leaders have two obligations that don’t pause while vendors catch up:

• Due diligence means knowing your exposure: which data must stay confidential for years, where it travels, what protects it, and which vendors your protection depends on.
• Due care means acting reasonably on what you know: prioritizing the most sensitive data, putting requirements into contracts, and protecting what you can now.

Your vendors may deliver much of the fix, but they don’t carry your accountability. You still own the data.

Why the government stepped in

Governments don’t usually set hard deadlines when industry is moving fast enough on its own. In my view, the recent wave of policy is a clear signal that voluntary progress has been too slow.

In June 2026, Executive Order 14412 set firm dates for federal systems: post-quantum encryption by the end of 2030 and post-quantum signatures by the end of 2031, with federal contractors expected to comply by the end of 2030. In October 2026, NIST finalized its transition guidance, deprecating today’s RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography after 2030 and disallowing them after 2035. In the financial sector, the G7 Cyber Expert Group has published a coordinated roadmap for the transition.

Even if your organization isn’t directly covered, these dates are fast becoming the benchmark for what “reasonable” looks like. When a regulator, auditor, customer or court later asks what you did once the risk was known, “we were waiting for our vendors” will be a hard answer to defend.

What you can do while vendors catch up

Waiting on third parties doesn’t mean doing nothing. Every organization can start with four questions:

• Where is it? Find the vulnerable cryptography that protects your most important data, starting with your crown-jewel systems rather than a complete inventory.
• In what order? Rank by how long data must stay secret and how hard each system is to change.
• Who owns it? Put an owner on every finding, and identify which ones depend on a supplier.
• Can we prove it? Once something is fixed, verify it, and keep verifying.

On the vendor side specifically: ask your critical suppliers for their post-quantum roadmaps, request a cryptographic bill of materials (CBOM) in CycloneDX format, add post-quantum requirements to new contracts and renewals, and put compensating controls around systems that can’t be upgraded yet. Protecting internet-facing traffic first is often the fastest win, and it doesn’t require every system to be inventoried.

The questions we worked through in the room, the six-phase program behind these four questions, and questions to take back to your team are collected on the Crypto-Agility in Practice resources page.

Start small, but start

The organizations that will handle this transition well aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones that turn interest into a plan: a short readiness review to find their exposure, a focused pilot to prove they can migrate, and a program that keeps them agile for the next change.

The room was full. The roadmaps are still empty. That gap is the opportunity.

Sources: Executive Order 14412, “Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks” (June 2026); NIST IR 8547, Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards (October 2026); G7 Cyber Expert Group, post-quantum roadmap for the financial sector (January 2026); Google and Cloudflare 2029 migration announcements; industry readiness surveys.