A strategic roadmap for the post-quantum CIO

The recent Palo Alto Networks Quantum Safe Summit assembled industry titans and cybersecurity leaders to deliver a sobering message to CIOs: the harvest now, decrypt later (HNDL) threat is real and active, and the window for cryptographic transition is closing.

For the modern CIO, quantum readiness is more than just a technical upgrade, it’s a fundamental requirement for long-term business resilience and public trust. And the consensus this year so far is quantum is no longer an if for CIOs, but a when. Customers, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders need to trust that the data being fed into AI systems is protected, and quantum looms as a major threat to breaking this trust.

To navigate this shift, CIOs must move beyond theoretical awareness and into a structured operational framework. The following roadmap provides a strategic checklist necessary to transition from legacy encryption to quantum-safe resilience.

The reality of the quantum clock

There’s a common misconception that quantum threats are decades away. But Jerry Chow, CTO of quantum-centric supercomputing at IBM, says the roadmap is accelerating. IBM targets its Starling processor, a 200-logical-qubit fault-tolerant system, for 2029, and the Blue Jay system, aiming for 1,000 logical qubits, by 2033. And while a million-qubit machine might be required to fully break RSA-2048 encryption, Nobel Laureate in physics John Martinis warns that the threat could arrive sooner via algorithmic breakthroughs.

“You have time to do this properly,” Martinis said during the summit, “but you don’t have an infinite amount of time.” Regarding algorithmic advances, most current encryption-breaking projections are based on quantum-classical hybrids — essentially running traditional logic on quantum hardware.

However, as fault-tolerant quantum systems become commercially accessible, we’ll see the rise of native quantum algorithms. These are mathematical models designed specifically for the unique properties of qubits, like superposition and entanglement, allowing them to solve problems that classical logic can’t even map. It’s the shift from doing old things on a new machine to doing things we once thought were impossible.

The HNDL risk and navigating standards

The most pressing reason for immediate action is HNDL. Adversaries currently intercept and store encrypted sensitive data like intellectual property, state secrets, and financial records with the intent to decrypt it once quantum hardware matures. If your data has a shelf life of over 10 years, it’s already at risk. IoT World Today references a Deloitte poll that found over 50% of surveyed professionals believe their organizations are at risk from HNDL attacks, yet only a fraction has completed a full data sensitive-life inventory.

The transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is being led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Dustin Moody, lead of the PQC project at NIST, says the standards are now ready for implementation.

Key milestones for CIOs:

• The 2035 mandate: The US Federal Government has set this deadline for full migration to PQC standards. Private sector organizations, especially those in regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and defense are expected to follow this timeline to maintain compliance and interoperability.
• Cryptographic agility: NIST and CISA urge organizations to move away from hard-coded security. Crypto agility, the ability to swap encryption algorithms without overhauling entire systems, is the new gold standard for IT architecture, and is something CIOs need to ensure is part of their deployment strategy. Getting locked into a specific algorithm could create long-term pain, making optionality mandatory.

The CIO’s action plan: discover, protect, accelerate

The summit outlined a three-pillar strategy for organizations to move from vulnerability to resilience.

Phase I: Discovery and inventory

You can’t secure what you can’t see. Most organizations lack a Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOM). The challenge is that cryptography is buried in everything from legacy OT to cloud-native microservices. So the goal is to use automated tools to map where RSA, ECC, and other vulnerable algorithms are used. Palo Alto Networks, for instance, leverages existing firewall telemetry to create quantum-aware discovery engines without needing new sensors.

Phase II: Systemic protection

Once a comprehensive cryptographic inventory is established, the CIO’s focus must shift to risk-based prioritization, where the shelf life of data dictates the urgency of remediation. But not all data carries equal quantum risk in that while a session token expires in minutes, corporate trade secrets or legal records must remain confidential for decades.

By segmenting assets into high-priority, long-lived data and lower-priority, short-lived data, organizations can ensure they’re securing the assets most vulnerable to retroactive decryption before the quantum clock runs out. The former would be long-term strategic data, such as IP and legal records, whereas the latter would be more short-lived information like one-time passwords and session tokens.

Some CIOs question the value of data after a few years. While not every byte of data retains its value over time, every enterprise possesses crown jewel information — intellectual property, long-term contracts, or sensitive PII — that remains high-value targets for retroactive decryption. The key is to understand what that data is and to protect it now. Today, that’s the minority of company data, although it’s still a healthy percentage. According to the 2025 Ponemon-Sullivan Privacy Report, 36% of all data currently in storage is considered mission-critical to organizational survival, yet most of this remains protected by classical encryption vulnerable to future quantum attacks.

Phase III: Solving the legacy anchor

This refers to mission-critical systems like satellite systems, medical devices, or ancient mainframe apps that can’t be easily updated. Anand Oswal, EVP at Palo Alto Networks, spoke about cipher translation, which allows next-gen firewalls to act as a translator, converting vulnerable traffic into a quantum-secure session in real-time. This effectively future-proofs legacy hardware without a rip and replace project.

Operationalizing quantum security

Mike Duffy, US Federal CISO, highlighted that quantum readiness is central to responsible IT modernization since without it, considering PQC readiness is really just creating technical debt in the future, he said.

As most CIOs have experienced, technical debt remains one of the biggest inhibitors in modernizing systems, and among the many challenges is to understand the financial and risk implications through resource allocation. Quantum migration isn’t a side project for the IT team, it requires dedicated budget and executive sponsorship. Another is vendor management issues. CIOs must demand PQC roadmaps from their vendors, and every new procurement today should be evaluated for its cryptographic agility.

The path forward

While Q-Day, or the day a quantum computer breaks the internet, is in the future, the security preparation for it must happen today. To adequately prepare, CIOs should appoint a quantum lead by tasking a senior member of IT or security to oversee the transition, conduct a CBOM inventory beginning with the most sensitive data flows, and engage with the ecosystem by using platforms that offer closed-loop resilience — systems that can both identify and enforce the cure at the network level.

Manual cryptographic migration is mathematically impossible at enterprise scale. The shift to quantum-safe security must be automated, platform-based, and initiated now.