Quantum Transition Planning is Lagging. Can We Catch Up?

Unforced errors are cause for frustration. This is a sports term that refers to a mistake by an athlete that is not the result of a skillful play by the opponent. This term is most often used in tennis but should also be used in post quantum cryptography (PQC). Right now, the US is well on its way to an unforced error in PQC transition that will not be the result of skillful play by an adversary. An April 2025 report by ISACA found that while 25% of respondents surveyed believed that quantum computing will result in “transformative potential” within 5 years, an eye-popping 95% of organizations are unprepared for the transition. Read another way, organizations see that quantum computing will result in impacts to their organizations but are not doing anything to prepare for that outcome. The trouble with quantum computing is that its timeline is indefinite causing may organizations to put off real preparation work to another day. The US, that’s government, industry, and academia, needs to start looking at PQC as a cybersecurity threat, not a theoretical exercise. 95% of organizations are driving toward an unforced error in the most significant cybersecurity threat we will face in our lifetimes. If any tennis player saw they were going to make such an error ahead of time, they would take steps to avoid it. Our cybersecurity deserves at least as much effort as an athlete puts into winning a tennis match. Subscribe now The Trouble with Quantum Those pesky quantum computers. Not intuitive. Probabilistic. Uncertain timeline. I could end the post here, but that would just contribute to the problem. Oftentimes, quantum computing and PQC are viewed as tomorrow problems. Messy, uncertain problems that someone else will solve. It’s understandable. Cybersecurity professionals have always looked at the world through the lens of threats. What vulnerabilities are there? What actions can I take to mitigate them? If attacked, how can I remediate the threat and recover my system? There’s an inherent specificity to that culture and it works great for conventional cybersecurity. When thinking about securing our systems against a quantum threat, that conventional thinking breaks. No one can say just when a quantum computer capable of breaking our current asymmetric encryption, known as a cryptoanalytically-relevant quantum computer (CRQC) will arrive. Many cannot explain the fundamental differences between a bit and a qubit and why that matters. That’s not casting aspersions. That’s addressing a fundamental issue in PQC preparation that contributes to that 95% number. There are two issues: Time Accessibility Time refers to the uncertainty of when a CRQC will arrive. Leaders, decision makers, and cybersecurity professionals understandably want to know the time, place, and nature of any threat they are facing. Because of the fundamental engineering challenges associated with fabricating hardware for quantum machines combined with the continued iteration on challenges like error correction, the answer to the “when” question is frustrating. That question must be answered not in days, months, or years but by acknowledging that a CRQC will arrive following one or a series of significant scientific breakthroughs. This response makes planning difficult and pushes people to leave the problem until there is more certainty. Enough to justify expenditure of resources and treasure. Accessibility refers to the non-intuitive and technical nature of the quantum threat. Naturally, understanding quantum computing requires an understanding of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is a scientific field that even scientists call weird. Particles on the quantum scale (i.e. atomic and sub-atomic) behave in entirely different ways that anything we can observe in our world. Those properties are central to the power of quantum computers and equally central to peoples’ aversion to the topic. Knowing how to answer why a bit and qubit are different and why it matters is a difficult and technical process that requires time investment to understand. Barriers to entry seem to rise from the ocean floor. The combination of an unsure timeline and difficult subject matter creates a perfect storm. This is why 95% of organizations are unprepared for the transition to PQC. But we have short memories. It was not that long ago that the idea of a global internet felt completely foreign and in no way understandable to the average person. Instant communications via email from a smartphone was unthinkable until it wasn’t. Basic concepts of cyber malware are complex, but many people understand at least why they are bad and what to do about them. Quantum is the same. Today, quantum is difficult but there will come a time when quantum computing is a part of our digital lives. Before that day, we have an obstacle to overcome; the post-quantum cryptography transition and right now we are not winning. Share Getting Transition Planning Right The 95% unprepared statistic is not nuanced. At that level, we are fundamentally unprepared as a society and as a digital infrastructure. But the unforced error has not happened yet. We are on our way toward it, but we can alter course. In 2021, the Department of Homeland Security created a PQC transition roadmap along with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) under the Department of Commerce. This roadmap was designed to give organizations the tools they need to start. Starting is often the most difficult place to be, but everyone needs to start. This guide, now 4 years old, remains one of the best resources for how to go about preparing for your transition. Creating a plan and understanding the threat are huge steps in the right direction and there is a guide available to help organizations do just that. While actions like a cryptographic inventory are underway, organizations need to take actions in parallel. Workforce education on quantum and PQC should be a priority. This kind of upskilling training is cheap compared to huge hardware and software transitions and will pay huge dividends. In conventional cybersecurity, most organizations require cybersecurity training on a rolling basis to ensure their security and mitigate possible human errors. For quantum, the requirement for workforce training is not about their work every day but about understanding a future technology that will have positive and negative impacts on your mission. Workforces need to understand what quantum computing is, not at a technical level, not in the sense that they can write and solve equations, but in a way that allows them to see the threat coming. Seeing the threat will put some urgency behind transition planning and begin to drop the 95% unprepared number from the report. Even reading this, many leaders will question why they should spend money, even nominal funds on training, for a threat they don’t fully understand and has no timeline. This is the circle that PQC preparedness constantly finds itself in. Uncertain time and inaccessible subject matter naturally push people away from the subject. But leaders must learn to resist the temptation to leave quantum preparedness to another day. The NIST PQC standards came out in August 2024 from a process that was ongoing since 2015. Guidance on PQC transition came out in 2021 and was followed by National Security Memorandum-10 and the Quantum Cybersecurity Preparedness Act followed in 2022. The issue is not new and there is attention on it. The next step is for industry to embrace the task at hand and not accept the trajectory toward an unforced error. If organizations can start their transition plans and upskilling their workforces, we bring the unprepared number down. That number corresponds directly to our quantum attack surface. It is the difference between secure data and a theft. Between secure communications and a breach. Quantum is not theoretical nor is our current level of unpreparedness. The good news is that we are not beyond a threshold from which we cannot recover. No tennis player would accept an unforced error she could prevent, and our cybersecurity should be no different.