Here's the wrong question: when will a quantum computer break today's encryption?
Here's the right one: how much of what you encrypted this year still needs to be secret in 2035?
What's the pattern?
Remember Y2K? Two-digit years in old software. Nothing broke on January 1, 2000, and people called it a hoax. It wasn't. It was the largest coordinated repair job in computing history, done quietly and early, which is exactly why nothing broke.
That's the pattern for quantum. Not a bang. A migration.
The threat is real but slow. To break the encryption most of the internet uses, you'd need a quantum computer with millions of stable qubits. Today's best have on the order of hundreds to low thousands, and they're noisy. Most serious estimates put a cryptographically relevant machine somewhere in the 2030s, and estimates keep moving.
But there's a twist that makes the date irrelevant. It's called harvest now, decrypt later. An adversary that records your encrypted traffic today doesn't need to break it today. They store it and wait. Health records, government files, trade secrets, anything that's still valuable in ten years is already exposed if it moved over the network this year.
In August 2024, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology published the first three post-quantum encryption standards. The math to defend against this exists and is approved. The remaining problem is the same as Y2K: finding every place the old thing lives and replacing it.
What should leaders do now?
So, three things.
Inventory your cryptography. Most organizations don't know where their encryption lives. That inventory is step one, and it takes months, so start.
Sort your data by shelf life. What needs to be secret in 2035? Migrate that first. What's worthless next week can wait.
And ask your vendors. Every cloud, every device, every piece of software you rely on has a post-quantum plan or doesn't. Ask in writing.
Y2K was a success story people mistook for a hoax. Quantum can be the same, if we do the boring work early.
What's in your systems today that still needs to be secret in ten years?
Related: Will quantum computing break encryption?
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