Guest Post: Quantum Investment May Start With Post-Quantum Security

Guest Post By Courtney Olujobi, Principal at Moon Pursuit Capital.

From an investment perspective, one of the first significant markets created by quantum computing may have very little to do with buying access to quantum computers themselves. It may come from the amount of capital businesses will need to spend protecting the financial systems, digital infrastructure and sensitive data that were built for a world in which today’s encryption was considered secure.

We do not know exactly when a quantum computer capable of breaking widely used public-key encryption will arrive, and estimates still vary considerably. Economically, what matters is that companies cannot wait for that moment to prepare. Spending on quantum resilience is already finding its way into regulation, procurement requirements and long-term technology planning, which means the commercial impact of quantum could start showing up in cybersecurity and infrastructure budgets well before quantum computing itself reaches broad commercial maturity.

The reason is simple. Encrypted data can be copied today and decrypted later. An adversary does not need a quantum computer to steal a bank’s archived records, a hospital’s patient files or a company’s deal documents. It only needs patience. So the relevant question for any business is not when the machine arrives. It is how long its data has to stay secret, and how long it will take to move that data onto new cryptography. If those two periods together run past the arrival date, the exposure has already started.