Planning Your Migration to Post-Quantum Standards

Migrating cryptographic infrastructure is not a short-term project. Large organizations take 10-15 years to fully update all systems. NIST estimates that quantum computers capable of breaking RSA-2048 could exist within 10-30 years. Given the harvest-now-decrypt-later threat and long migration timelines, organizations must begin planning today, even if the immediate quantum threat seems distant.

Crypto-agility means designing systems so that cryptographic algorithms can be swapped out without redesigning the entire architecture. An agile system centralizes algorithm selection in configuration, uses abstract key types, and decouples protocol logic from specific cipher implementations. Systems that hardcode RSA or ECDH in their protocol logic will require far more expensive migrations than agile ones.