Regulatory, technical, and operational timelines are converging and waiting to transition to PQC is getting risky.
If your organization hasn’t started planning its migration to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), you’re in the majority.
While many organizations remain unprepared, the window for passive observation is closing. Governments and standards bodies no longer treat PQC as an open-ended research topic but a hard compliance and operational requirement. 2026 is emerging as the point where having a clear map of your cryptographic landscape across your environment is no longer optional.
The Regulatory Timeline Is Already Set
Formal roadmaps are emerging across the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the GCC. Globally, NIST has finalized the first set of post-quantum cryptography standards. In parallel, the US NSA's CNSA 2.0 framework sets 2026 as the year national security systems must begin their transition by completing cryptographic discovery and ensuring all new designs and procurements align with CNSA 2.0 ahead of mandatory compliance in 2027.
The long-term picture is consistent across jurisdictions, with clear milestones tied to cryptographic discovery, inventory, and migration planning. A global convergence on deprecation dates is taking shape: algorithms such as RSA and ECC are slated for deprecation by 2030 and will be disallowed entirely by 2035. This may still be a decade away, but organizations that delay face increasingly constrained options. When migration suddenly becomes urgent, flexibility disappears.
By 2035, continued reliance on classical public-key cryptography will be non-compliant with regulatory standards in most sectors. Even in regions where guidance remains non-binding today, we can expect it to evolve into formal mandates as adoption increases and enforcement mechanisms mature.
Why Start Your PQC Migration Today (Not “One Day”)
The Threat is Already Active
Many 2026 mandates do not yet require full migration, but "harvest now, decrypt later" is a pressing concern. For data with a shelf life of 10+ years—such as national ID records, long-term financial contracts, or healthcare data—the threat is active today: if it's not quantum secure now, it's already vulnerable to future decryption.
This Isn't Like Previous Cryptographic Upgrades
Earlier cryptographic transitions were largely incremental — swapping one algorithm for a stronger version of the same underlying mathematics. Examples include moving from SHA-1 to SHA-256, increasing RSA key sizes, or upgrading TLS versions.
PQC replaces the mathematical foundations of public-key infrastructure entirely. Cryptography is silently embedded in every layer of the stack — from VPNs and cloud APIs to hardware security modules and firmware — so simply patching your way to quantum resilience is a fallacy. This is a multi-year re-engineering effort, one that cannot be taken lightly. In fact, it’s likely the largest cryptographic migration in modern history.
Discovery Is Your Starting Point And It Never Ends
Hesitation is understandable but the clock is ticking. Organizations that continue to ‘wait and see’ invite technical debt and unacceptable risk.
By 2026, organizations are broadly expected to have completed a cryptographic inventory to identify where cryptography is used, which algorithms are in play, which systems rely on long-lived keys or data, and crucially, which assets are quantum-vulnerable. Waiting beyond this point means falling behind before migration even begins. Discovery is not optional preparation but is a prerequisite for any credible transition strategy.
Discovery is the hard part, and it never ends. Cryptographic discovery is complex, distributed, and continuous. Environments change constantly as new applications are deployed, certificates are renewed, and integrations evolve. Each change alters cryptographic exposure. A one-time inventory quickly becomes obsolete and manual tracking does not scale. Instead, continuous discovery enables cryptographic agility.
Organizations cannot secure cryptography they have not identified or inventoried.
Phased Approach From Awareness to Agile Resilience
No regulator or standards body expects full post-quantum migration overnight. Instead, organizations are expected to follow a phased progression from awareness and discovery toward cryptographic agility.
We advise a phased approach from awareness to agile resilience:
- Inform and align: Establish executive ownership by framing PQC as a business continuity, risk, and compliance issue. Assign clear accountability, allocate budget, define a transition strategy, and build internal awareness across security, IT, and risk teams.
- Discover and automate: Move beyond manual spreadsheets. Use automated discovery to continuously map cryptographic assets, including algorithms, certificates, keys, dependencies, and expiry timelines. Prioritize findings based on data sensitivity and risk and replace point-in-time inventories with continuous monitoring.
- Test and validate: Run proofs of concept using hybrid schemes that combine classical and post-quantum algorithms. This allows teams to surface interoperability, performance, and operational issues early without weakening existing security.
- Upgrade and deploy incrementally: Modernize infrastructure in phases rather than attempting a wholesale replacement. Roll out changes deliberately, validate at each stage, and ensure systems remain stable and compliant as post-quantum capabilities are introduced.
Automated, continuous discovery makes crypto agility sustainable and turns post-quantum readiness from a one-time migration project into an ongoing operational capability.
The global transition to post-quantum cryptography is well underway. In 2026, preparedness is expected to be visible, explainable, and defensible, even though formal migration deadlines remain several years away. But, as policy signals continue to translate into operational expectations, the gap between prepared and reactive organizations will widen.
Organizations that begin cryptographic discovery now will control their transition timeline and maintain flexibility in how they migrate. Those that wait will find their options constrained by regulation, compressed timelines, and accumulated technical debt.
When your organization is ready to begin cryptographic discovery, QuantumGate can help provide a clear map of your environment. Our Crypto Discovery Tool automates the identification of cryptography across your environments, providing the continuous visibility necessary to manage exposure and build a structured path toward quantum resilience.