Preparing for quantum computing has a pressing problem at its core: nobody can tell businesses when the threat will arrive.

There will be no single morning when a sufficiently powerful quantum computer switches on and today’s encryption stops working. It could still be years away. But waiting for certainty would be a mistake, because replacing the cryptography woven through decades of technology will itself take years. The countdown that matters isn’t the one to quantum capability. It’s the one to your own readiness.

India has begun to act on that. Earlier this year, the Department of Science and Technology’s Task Force on the Implementation of a Quantum Safe Ecosystem in India set out a roadmap for moving the country toward quantum-safe security. The approach is deliberately phased: build the foundations, migrate the highest-priority systems, and ultimately adopt post-quantum cryptography, or PQC, at full scale. That sequencing changes the question for business leaders. The question is no longer when quantum computing becomes a problem. It is how long it will take your organization to be ready.

The hardest part may be knowing where to start

Cryptography is everywhere inside a large organization, and almost entirely out of sight. It protects communications, identities, applications, payments and devices, quietly, in the background. Most enterprises today are constrained by cryptographic debt – years of accumulated, undocumented and deprecated encryption protocols buried deep within legacy applications, third-party software libraries and unmanaged IoT devices. This creates a vast and largely invisible attack surface that traditional vulnerability scanners were never designed to detect.

Few organizations can say where all of it sits, what it protects or how hard it would be to replace. That is a serious problem the moment those foundations need to change.

So before buying anything quantum-safe, organizations need to understand what they already have. A Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOM) can help draw that picture, but the point is visibility. Security teams need to know which systems rely on vulnerable cryptography, what information those systems protect and where migration will be hardest. And because environments never stop changing, this can’t be a one-time audit but requires continuous oversight.

Not everything needs to move at once

Finding vulnerable cryptography doesn’t make every system equally urgent. This is one of the real strengths of India’s phased approach: the Task Force separates the sectors that must move fastest from those with more time, and businesses should apply the same logic inside their own walls.

Picture two sets of encrypted data. The first loses its value within months. The second holds intellectual property, biometric records or sensitive government information that must stay secret for decades. Their exposure to the same future threat is not remotely the same.

That gap matters because attackers don’t need to decrypt data today to profit from stealing it. They can collect it now and sit on it, waiting for computing power that can finally open it. This “harvest now, decrypt later” risk means leaders must ask not only how valuable their data is today, but how long it has to stay protected.

The first systems to migrate, then, should be those where future exposure would hurt most, not simply the oldest technology or the easiest to upgrade. That focuses effort where the risk is greatest, instead of trying to transform everything at once.

The bigger lesson is adaptability

With any major technology shift, the temptation is to hunt for the replacement, install it and call the problem solved. Quantum readiness won’t work that way.

The standards considered secure today may not be the last ones organizations ever need. Standards evolve, vulnerabilities surface, and systems that once looked permanent eventually have to change. That is why crypto-agility matters: the ability to swap out cryptographic algorithms, keys and protocols without rebuilding the infrastructure around them.

For business leaders, the implication is simple. The harder security is to change, the costlier and more disruptive every future transition becomes. Technology bought and built today should be judged not only on whether it is secure now, but on whether it can adapt when the standards move.

Legacy systems will be among the hardest problems

Older applications, IoT devices, OT systems, and embedded technologies may not support modern cryptographic updates. Organizations need a way to bridge today’s classical infrastructure with a quantum-resilient future without disrupting business operations.

That is why migration can’t assume every vulnerable system can simply be swapped out. Cipher translation supports hybrid key exchange models during phased migration and preserves policy enforcement controls while minimizing disruption to legacy systems. Through cipher translation, its infrastructure acts as a proxy, providing agentic remediation that reencrypts vulnerable traffic into quantum-safe standards in real time at the network edge. This approach quickly moves legacy assets from a high-risk current state to a quantum-safe posture.

The clock has already started

The significance of India’s quantum-safe roadmap is not that businesses should panic. It is that they now have a clearer basis for planning before the threat turns urgent.

That window is best spent on four things: finding where vulnerable cryptography lives, identifying which data must stay protected longest, modernizing infrastructure as it comes up for renewal, and pressing technology suppliers for clearer migration paths.

Quantum readiness will eventually mean new cryptography. But the work starts much earlier, with visibility, prioritization and the ability to change.

We may not know when quantum computing will break today’s security assumptions. We do know that waiting until then to prepare will already be too late.

The author is Bhanupreet Saini, Director and Head of Public Policy & Government Affairs (India), Palo Alto Networks.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETCISO does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETCISO shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organization directly or indirectly.

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