The Day I Realized We're All Living in Pre-Quantum Denial (And What It Taught Me About Leadership)

We pushed a hotfix before sunrise, and I found myself staring at our encryption layer thinking: this is all theater, isn't it?

Here's what nobody wants to talk about at the leadership level:

Quantum computing isn't coming. It's here. And every single RSA key we're using today? Every certificate chain? Every "military-grade encryption" promise we've made to customers?

It's all just borrowed time wrapped in borrowed algorithms.

I'll be vulnerable here: I spent three years building our security infrastructure. Led a team of brilliant engineers. We followed every best practice. Got our SOC 2. Our ISO certifications. Put them on the website with pride.

And yet, the moment some researcher in a lab coat fires up a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, all of it—all of it—becomes security theater. "Harvest now, decrypt later" isn't a threat model. It's our current reality that we're collectively choosing to ignore.

The hard truth I've learned as a technical leader:

We're not migrating to post-quantum cryptography fast enough. Not even close. The NIST standards are published. The libraries exist. But the organizational inertia? The technical debt? The "we'll get to it next quarter" mentality?

We're basically rearranging deck chairs while quantum computers are the iceberg AND the ocean.

During an incident review that started late last week, I asked my team: "What's our PQC migration timeline?"

The silence was deafening.

So here's what we're doing differently:

We're treating this like Y2K met the 2038 problem met every cybersecurity incident rolled into one. Because it is. We're allocating 30% of our engineering capacity to quantum-resistant migrations. Starting now. Not next quarter.

Is it painful? Absolutely. Is it slowing down feature development? You bet. Is it the right thing to do while everyone else is sleepwalking into cryptographic obsolescence?

Still shipping.

Question for my network: What's your organization's post-quantum strategy? Or are we all just hoping the timeline is someone else's problem?

Systems over stress. Grateful for the team that held the line.

#QuantumComputing #Cybersecurity #TechnicalLeadership #PostQuantumCryptography #SecurityFirst