Post-Quantum Readiness
Are You Ready for Post-Quantum Cryptography? The 2026 Readiness Gap — and the 3-Minute First Step
69% see the quantum risk, only ~5% have acted. Learn why teams stall, what Mosca's theorem means for your data, and the 3-minute first step.
Are You Ready for Post Quantum Cryptography? The 2026 Readiness Gap — and the 3 Minute First Step Most security leaders now know that quantum computing will eventually break the encryption protecting their data. Far fewer have done anything about it. In a 2025 DigiCert study, roughly 69% of enterprises recognized the quantum risk — yet only about 5% had quantum safe encryption in place. That gap between awareness and action is the single most important thing to understand about post quantum cryptography (PQC) in 2026, and closing it is easier to start than most people assume. The awareness vs action gap is real — and wide The numbers tell a consistent story across multiple 2025 surveys. ISACA found that only about 5% of organizations have a defined quantum strategy , and roughly 95% lack a roadmap for migrating to post quantum cryptography. Other 2025 research reinforces the picture: around 81% of respondents said their cryptographic libraries and HSMs aren't prepared , and about 91% have no formal migration roadmap. So the recognition is there. The problem isn't that leaders don't believe quantum is a threat — it's that they don't know where to begin. And there's a specific, fixable reason for that paralysis. Why most teams stall: they don't know where cryptography lives Cryptography isn't a single product you can point to. It's woven invisibly through your entire estate — TLS certificates on public and internal services, the RSA and ECC public keys behind them, VPN tunnels, code signing pipelines, embedded firmware, databases, and the libraries inside applications nobody has touched in years. You can't migrate what you can't see. Before any team can choose new algorithms or set a timeline, it has to answer a deceptively hard question: where does cryptography actually live in our organization, and what algorithms are we using? This is exactly the visibility gap that stalls most PQC programs, and it's why the recommended first move is never "rip and replace." It's to build a cryptographic inventory — a catalog of the cryptographic assets you depend on. Without that foundation, a roadmap is just guesswork. The clock has already started for long lived data Here's the part that makes inaction risky even though no quantum computer can break RSA today. Adversaries don't have to wait. Under a strategy known as "harvest now, decrypt later" (HNDL) , they collect encrypted long lived data today and store it, intending to decrypt it once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) exists. This isn't a fringe theory — DHS, the UK's NCSC, ENISA, and Australia's ACSC all base their guidance on this premise. If your data needs to stay confidential for years (think health records, financial data, government secrets, intellectual property), it is arguably already exposed. The cleanest way to reason about your own exposure is Mosca's theorem . It states that if your migration time (X) plus your data security shelf life (Y) is greater than the time until a CRQC arrives (Z) — that is, if X + Y Z — then your data is already at risk. Plug in realistic numbers. The Global Risk Institute's 2025 quantum threat timeline (led by Michele Mosca) puts the median expert estimate for a CRQC at roughly 2029–2032, with about a 34% probability by 2030. If migration across a large estate takes years (X), and your data must stay secret for a decade (Y), the sum easily exceeds the time until Z. The clock started the day your data was created. To be clear and hones