How To Prepare For Quantum Computing, The Complete Readiness Guide

Knowing how to prepare for quantum computing now means two separate jobs, and most organisations only think about one of them. The first is defensive, because a future quantum computer will break the public-key cryptography that protects almost everything you send and store, and the deadlines for fixing that are already published, and in the US federal sector they already bind. The second is offensive, because quantum machines are now rentable by the hour and the people who can use them are scarce. This guide is the practical version. It tells you which deadline actually applies to you, how to find the cryptography you did not know you had, what to do in what order, and how to build the capability to use these machines rather than just defend against them. The threat itself is covered in our guide to Q-Day, and the vendors in our directory of post-quantum cryptography companies, so neither is repeated here. The standards are finished. NIST published FIPS 203, 204 and 205 on 13 August 2024. The excuse that there was nothing to migrate to expired two years ago. 2030 is the real deadline, not 2035. NIST intends to deprecate RSA-2048 and the 112-bit elliptic…