The 6 Steps Organizations Should Immediately Take to Mitigate Quantum-Related Risk
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The reality of quantum computing is not quite here, but nobody should fool themselves into believing they should not prepare ahead of time.
As the time draws closer, LevelBlue recognizes the profound security risks it poses to today’s cryptographic foundations.
The threat isn’t theoretical. Quantum‑enabled attacks will fundamentally reshape how organizations must protect their data, systems, and long‑term digital assets. LevelBlue’s deep expertise in cryptographic modernization and a proactive approach to emerging threats position us to guide enterprises through this transition.
Our team is ready to help organizations understand their exposure, mitigate near‑term quantum risks, and chart a clear, strategic path toward a quantum‑secure future.
To help prepare for this eventuality, here is a list of steps organizations will need to take:
Enterprises need to assess their current 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. Executive leadership must be engaged early to set expectations around funding, staffing, governance, and realistic multi-year timelines.
Organizations should address “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.
Enterprises must gain visibility into their cryptographic landscape. This requires a 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.
Organizations should begin tactical remediation and pilot migrations. After conducting risk analysis and prioritization, 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.
Enterprises must 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.
Organizations should focus on building long-term cryptographic agility. 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 knows that organizations must assess, inventory, remediate, pilot, and strategically plan now in order to reduce risk and successfully navigate the inevitable transition to quantum-secure cryptosystems.
LevelBlue is a globally recognized cybersecurity leader that reduces cyber risk and fortifies organizations against disruptive and damaging cyber threats. Our comprehensive offensive and defensive cybersecurity portfolio detects what others cannot, responds with greater speed and effectiveness, optimizes client investment, and improves security resilience. Learn more about us.