Quantum computing is an emerging technology that presents significant data security risk to global organizations that rely on quantum vulnerable encryption algorithms, systems, and infrastructure.
The threat isn’t theoretical. The risk of quantum-enabled attacks will fundamentally reshape how organizations encrypt their data, design their digital trust infrastructure, and maintain agility in production cryptographic systems.
The era of digital trust transformation has arrived and urgent PQC adopters are beginning to develop strategies, execute pilots, and formalize migration plans. Many are wisely expecting a 2-3 year migration window with urgent adopters being government, defense, financial services, healthcare, and technology. These early movers are targeting 2028 for critical system PQC migration. To hit that target, organizations must start planning now. LevelBlue advises Clients that the following steps can be used as general guidance for how to kickstart your PQC migration strategy.
To help prepare for this eventuality, here is a list of steps organizations will need to take:
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Assess enterprise cryptographic risk management capabilities. This includes evaluating overall cryptographic maturity, understanding how cryptography is governed across the organization, and initiating formal planning for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration. Remembering that this is likely a 2-3 year exercise, executive leadership must be engaged early to set expectations around funding, staffing, governance, and realistic multi-year timelines. Moreover, organizations should clearly define migration ownership, encourage the establishment of a PMO, and define roles and responsibilities.
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Assess and respond to “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” (HNDL) risk. Even before quantum computers can break modern encryption at scale, adversaries may already be collecting encrypted data for future decryption. Companies should conduct near-term assessments to identify sensitive data that could be exposed under this scenario and prioritize mitigation of high-value systems and long-lived data. In cases where cryptographic systems cannot be updated to PQC algorithms, compensating controls should be sought as well as other tactics to mitigate HDNL risk.
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Gain complete and accurate visibility into their cryptographic landscape. This requires comprehensive discovery and inventory of cryptographic assets, including hosts, applications, APIs, cloud and on-prem environments, PKI, HSMs, certificates, keys, tokens, libraries, and protocols. Both runtime monitoring and static analysis should be used to identify hardcoded algorithms and embedded cryptographic dependencies, including third-party components. This visibility is foundational for risk prioritization and migration planning. It is essential to success that organizations maintain real-time visibility into their cryptographic landscape, which will require a blend of subject matter expertise and technology solutioning.
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Initiate tactical remediation and pilot migrations. After conducting risk analysis and prioritization, establishing a discovery and inventory capability, organization teams should remediate the most urgent vulnerabilities and launch logically scoped PQC pilot programs. These pilots allow for testing, validation, and refinement before broader rollout.
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Prepare for a structured, multi-year, phased migration program. PQC transition will span planning, discovery, testing, pre-production validation, DevSecOps integration, and production deployment. Backward compatibility, interoperability, and business continuity must be carefully managed throughout.
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Focus on building long-term cryptographic agility as an optimal target state. This includes decoupling cryptographic functions from application logic, enabling runtime-selectable cipher suites, centralizing certificate and key lifecycle management, and designing systems that support modularity and algorithm replacement. Moving from a static cryptographic posture to a dynamic, agile one will reduce disruption and future-proof the enterprise against evolving threats.
LevelBlue is a leading provider of cryptographic strategic, technical, and operational services. Partnering with LevelBlue will provide organizations with an edge during the migration and provide confidence that highly complex problems are being supported by top-tier experts.
