Your encrypted data can be stolen twice. Once when somebody copies it, and again years later when they open it. The second theft is the one almost nobody is planning for.
The tactic
Encryption does not stop anyone from copying your data. It stops them from reading it. So a patient adversary copies now and files it away: intercepted traffic, exfiltrated backups, whole mailboxes. Storage is nearly free. Then they wait for the math to catch up.
This is called harvest now, decrypt later, and it is not a theory. It is the operating assumption written into US federal planning documents, the reason NIST finalized quantum-resistant encryption standards in August 2024, and the reason the NSA set hard procurement deadlines that begin in January 2027.
Why it works
Today's public-key encryption rests on math problems that classical computers cannot solve in any useful timeframe. A sufficiently capable quantum computer solves them quickly. Nobody has one yet. But the trend line is not subtle: in 2019, breaking a standard RSA-2048 key was estimated to require about 20 million noisy qubits. By 2025, published research had cut that estimate to under one million, running for about a week. IBM has committed to fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2029, and Google set 2029 as its own internal migration deadline.
Nobody can tell you the year the wall falls. That is exactly the point. The people whose job is to be right about this stopped debating the year and started migrating.
The one question that matters
How long must your secrets stay secret? That is the whole analysis. If the answer is two years, you probably outrun the threat. If it is ten, then data captured from you this morning will still be sensitive when the hardware arrives, and today's encryption is the only thing protecting it.
Run your own numbers. Our two-minute calculator plots your data's shelf life and your migration runway against the arrival estimates. The verdict is arithmetic, not opinion.
Who should move first
- Anyone holding decade-scale secrets: designs, formulas, legal files, health records, personnel files, M&A history.
- Anyone in a federal supply chain: the deadlines flow down to you through your customers, whether or not you sell to the government directly.
- Anyone whose customers will ask: vendor security questionnaires already ask about post-quantum plans. "We have started the inventory" is a very different answer than silence.
The fix is not exotic. The replacement standards exist and are final. The work is knowing where cryptography lives in your business, ranking what is exposed, and migrating in order of shelf life. Being early is cheap. Being late is not recoverable, because the copies were made years before.