The White House Executive Order on securing the nation against advanced cryptographic attacks accelerates the mandatory timeline for post-quantum readiness.

For years, post-quantum cryptography has been discussed as an important, yet abstract future technical migration. Because of the uncertain timeline for quantum computing, it has been difficult for most organizations to prioritize quantum readiness against more immediate security demands.

That is changing.

Signed on June 22, 2026, the Executive Order mandates the transition of federal information systems to post-quantum cryptography and establishes a national policy to migrate them to NIST-approved standards. It also extends the urgency beyond government by directing support for critical infrastructure owners and operators, advancing requirements for federal contractors, and calling for cryptographic bill of materials guidance.

The order directly addresses harvest now, decrypt later risk and sets transition milestones for federal high-value assets and high-impact systems: 2030 for key establishment and 2031 for digital signatures.

While the order directly applies to U.S. Federal civilian agencies, it should be seen as a signal of broader policy and procurement momentum. Organizations that do business with the government, support critical infrastructure, or operate in regulated industries such as energy, financial services, and healthcare should expect post-quantum readiness expectations to accelerate.

Quantum risk has shifted from a long-term research concern to a national cybersecurity priority tied to sensitive data, critical infrastructure, federal systems, procurement, and the broader digital economy. For security teams, the challenge now is turning that urgency into an operational plan.

Operationalizing the quantum mandate

As quantum computing advances, widely used public-key cryptography will become vulnerable to future attacks. Even before a cryptographically relevant quantum computer exists, adversaries can capture encrypted data now with the goal of decrypting it later.

This “harvest now, decrypt later” risk is especially concerning for organizations that protect sensitive information with a long shelf life. The response cannot wait until the threat fully materializes.

The broader ripple effect matters because compliance alone will not equal readiness. As requirements flow into federal acquisition rules and contractor obligations, the vendor ecosystem will be pushed to support quantum-safe capabilities in the products and services that enterprises, critical infrastructure organizations, and regulated industries rely on.

Adding support for post-quantum algorithms is not the same as safely migrating to them. Support means a system can use new algorithms. Readiness means the organization knows where cryptography exists, which systems are exposed, which dependencies matter most, and how to execute changes without creating disruption or new risk.

That matters because post-quantum migration can affect more than cryptographic libraries. Larger cryptographic objects, new protocol behaviors, hybrid modes, hardware acceleration requirements, interoperability constraints, and legacy system limitations can create real performance, availability, and compatibility challenges if changes are made blindly.

This is why cryptographic visibility must lead to actionable migration planning.

Security teams cannot migrate what they cannot see. But visibility by itself is not enough. They also need to classify exposure, prioritize high-value systems and long-lived data, understand operational dependencies, and plan changes in a way that avoids disruption, downgrade risk, or incomplete migration.

Cryptographic bill of materials guidance will be an important step toward mapping cryptographic assets. But a CBOM should be the starting point, not the finish line. An inventory can show where cryptography exists, but readiness requires understanding business impact, migration complexity, interoperability risk, ownership, and the order in which changes should happen.

Post-quantum readiness is not just an algorithm swap. It is an operating model for managing cryptographic change at scale.

Five actions for post-quantum readiness

The path forward starts with five practical actions.

• First, see cryptographic exposure. Organizations must gain visibility into cryptographic usage across all environments to mitigate the risks associated with undocumented encryption.
• Second, prioritize what matters most. Cryptographic exposure varies in urgency. Organizations should prioritize protecting authentication, high-value assets, and long-lived sensitive data based on risk and business impact.
• Third, modernize trust infrastructure. Existing systems rely on fixed cryptographic assumptions. Post-quantum readiness demands flexible infrastructure and trust services that support evolving standards.
• Fourth, automate cryptographic change. Manual tracking with spreadsheets provides an incomplete, point-in-time snapshot that quickly becomes outdated and is insufficient for the coming changes. Automation allows organizations to manage cryptographic updates and trust operations in a consistent, controlled manner.
• Fifth, govern readiness over time. Post-quantum migration requires continuous governance to track progress, align ownership, and adapt to evolving threats and standards.

These actions help security leaders move from awareness to readiness.

What this means for cybersecurity now

The Cryptographic Reset is already underway, driven by post-quantum risk, shorter certificate lifecycles, machine identity growth, fragmented cryptographic ownership, CA distrust events, and expanding digital infrastructure.

The organizations that move first will not simply be the ones that adopt new algorithms the fastest. They will be the ones that build the visibility, operating model, and governance needed to manage cryptographic change continuously.

Take the next step

Read the guide: The Post-Quantum Readiness Race Is On: Five Actions Security Leaders Can Take to Accelerate Crypto Agility.

More resources

• Blog: The Cryptographic Reset Has Begun
• Watch: Palo Alto Networks Quantum
• Blog: Palo Alto Networks Leads the Way with Quantum and Multicloud Security
• Blog: Introducing Palo Alto Networks Quantum-Safe Security
• Blog: Palo Alto Networks Announces New Quantum Security Innovations
• Press Release: Palo Alto Networks Delivers Enterprise Wide Quantum Security Readiness for All Customers

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Accelerating the Migration to the Post-Quantum Era

The promise of quantum computing brings an unprecedented paradox. While it will unlock revolutionary breakthroughs in science, materials discovery and medicine, it simultaneously poses an existential threat to the mathematical foundations of modern cybersecurity.

For decades, the global economy has relied on public key cryptography to safeguard everything from personal privacy to national security. This cryptography is built on mathematical problems that are computationally infeasible for classical computers to solve but that quantum computers can solve efficiently, rendering today’s cryptographic protocols obsolete.

Using Shor’s algorithm, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could factor the large prime numbers that underpin public key cryptography, in minutes. These are tasks that would take today’s most advanced supercomputers a millennium to crack. This capability would effectively turn our strongest digital defenses into open doors, creating a period of vulnerability leading up to Q-Day – the day today’s encryption is broken.

The Migration Crisis: Why Traditional Strategies Fail

For CISOs and technical leaders, the transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is not a simple patch-and-deploy exercise. It is a multiyear transformation that requires updating cryptography across every device, application, certificate and infrastructure component in the enterprise.

Most enterprises today are constrained by cryptographic debt – years of accumulated, undocumented and deprecated encryption protocols buried deep within legacy applications, third-party software libraries and unmanaged IoT devices. This creates a vast and largely invisible attack surface that traditional vulnerability scanners were never designed to detect.

The challenge is compounded by the absence of a unified source of truth. Existing tools offer a fragmented "outside-in" view of the environment. They may identify devices on the network, but they lack visibility into cryptographic libraries embedded within live traffic. Without a real-time Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOM), security teams are forced to rely on manual, point-in-time audits that become outdated almost immediately. Spreadsheets cannot scale to this problem.

This visibility gap makes it impossible to prioritize remediation, leaving sensitive data exposed to harvest now, decrypt later (HNDL) attacks. In these attacks, adversaries intercept and store encrypted data today with the intent of unlocking it once quantum computing capabilities mature.

Operationally, traditional migration approaches are equally unworthy. Manually updating cryptography across thousands of global endpoints and branch offices often requires disruptive rip and replace strategies that threaten uptime and demand specialized expertise that is in extremely short supply. Organizations need a way to bridge today’s classical infrastructure with a quantum-resilient future without disrupting business operations or exhausting IT resources.

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe global enterprises cannot afford to wait. Our new Quantum-Safe Security solution is designed to remove these operational roadblocks by making cryptographic discovery, risk assessment and transition both continuous and actionable. We empower enterprises to gain real-time visibility into cryptographic risk and begin building agentic resilience at enterprise scale by integrating with existing security and infrastructure systems, including security information and event management (SIEM), load balancers, endpoint detection and response (EDR), as well as Application Vulnerability Management (AVM) tools.

The Four Stages of Cryptographic Inventory & Remediation

Palo Alto Networks Quantum-Safe Security is built around four foundational stages.

1. Continuous Discovery through Ecosystem Ingestion

Visibility is the first line of defense, but in a complex enterprise, true visibility requires more than a periodic scan. It requires continuous, high-fidelity ingestion of cryptographic intelligence across the environment.

Our solution acts as a central nervous system for your cryptographic posture, ingesting telemetry and logs directly from PAN-OS NGFW and Prisma® Access, enriched with data from a broad ecosystem of third-party security solutions, simplifying Day 0 onboarding. By leveraging your existing network infrastructure as sensors, we provide a comprehensive view of the cryptographic behavior of all assets without the operational friction of deploying new software.

To eliminate blind spots, we go beyond our own telemetry to ingest critical information from your existing systems you rely on. This includes syncing with configuration management database (CMDB) and asset management platforms to align cryptographic data with business inventories, integrating with EDR and access control solutions to monitor endpoint behavior, and aggregating data from network clouds and log platforms. The result is a unified intelligence layer that reflects how cryptography is actually used across the enterprise.

By synthesizing these data streams, we deliver a multidimensional view of cryptographic exposure:

• Discovery – Identification of every application, user device, infrastructure component and IoT device.
• Behavior – Analysis of traffic metadata, including protocols, key exchange mechanisms, encryption algorithms, hashes, certificates and tunnels.
• Context – Precise attribution of hardware models, cryptographic libraries (such as deprecated OpenSSL versions), and browser versions in use.

2. Risk Assessment & Prioritization

Not all data is created equal, and a successful migration requires a surgical focus on where the exposure is most acute. Our Quantum Safe Security solution quantifies risk by correlating cryptographic strength with business criticality, providing a clear, prioritized view of current risk and where remediation matters most.

Assets are categorized into strategic zones, starting with immediate exposure risks caused by deprecated protocols that are vulnerable to classical exploitation today. From there, the solution addresses long-term harvest now, decrypt later threats. As threat models evolve, the risk engine is designed to expand to emerging vectors like identity and authentication integrity, anticipating risks such as “Trust Now, Forge Later" attacks that could undermine digital trust at scale.

At the same time, the solution validates and tracks quantum-secure assets that have successfully transitioned to post-quantum or hybrid-PQC algorithms. By correlating this intelligence with business criticality and data shelf-life, security leaders can make informed decisions. For example, a crown jewel asset containing data that must remain confidential for a decade or more, is flagged as a high HNDL risk today and elevated to the top of the migration queue.

3. Comprehensive Remediation

Moving from a vulnerable state to quantum resilience is a structured journey. Our comprehensive remediation framework guides organizations through three critical stages, supported by automated workflows and prioritized recommendations at every step.

• Current State to Quantum Ready: The first stage focuses on infrastructure modernization. Using continuous discovery insights, the solution provides hardware and software recommendations required to support next-generation cryptographic protocols. An asset reaches a Quantum Ready state once it has the underlying hardware and OS capabilities to support post-quantum algorithms, even if those protocols are not yet activated.
• Quantum Ready to Quantum-Safe: Transitioning to a Quantum-safe state requires activation and configuration of post-quantum defenses. Our solution provides data configuration and certificate compliance guidance to enable PQC/Hybrid-PQC algorithms to be correctly implemented across the estate.
• Virtual Patching via Cipher Translation: For all current and especially legacy systems or IoT devices that cannot be upgraded, we provide an accelerated path to quantum-safety. Through Cipher Translation, the infrastructure acts as a proxy, providing agentic remediation that reencrypts vulnerable traffic into quantum-safe standards (such as ML-KEM) in real-time at the network edge. This approach instantly moves legacy assets from a high-risk current state to a Quantum-safe posture without a single line of code change.

4. Governance: Continuous Crypto-Hygiene & Global Compliance

Quantum readiness is not a one-time event; it is a strategic enterprise transformation that requires continuous oversight to prevent the re-emergence of vulnerabilities. Our governance framework provides the guardrails for your migration through two critical layers of management:

Continuous Crypto-Hygiene & Ongoing Management: Maintaining high-fidelity visibility is essential to preventing the accumulation of "crypto-debt." Our solution automates real-time mapping of all cryptographic dependencies, ensuring your CBOM remains dynamic and accurate as your environment evolves. Furthermore, we introduce Active Drift Detection, which automatically detects and can even block the use of weak or noncompliant ciphers in real-time, preventing developers or third-party services from accidentally introducing insecure protocols.

Global Crypto-Compliance Enforcement & Reporting: As regulatory pressure from governments (like the US Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite 2.0) mounts, organizations must demonstrate measurable progress. Our solution will provide Automated Framework Auditing, offering continuous, native mapping of your environment against global standards, including NIST, FIPS 140-3, and DORA.

Architecting a Quantum-Resilient Enterprise

The transition to quantum-safe security is far more than a technical upgrade. It represents a fundamental shift in how organizations protect the longevity and integrity of their digital assets. Achieving quantum resilience is a multiyear effort that requires both advanced technology and strategic partnership.

That's why Palo Alto Networks has established Integrated Quantum Practices, bringing together technology, partners and professional services to help organizations navigate the complexity of this transition with confidence. By combining deep cryptographic visibility with intelligent, agentic remediation, organizations can systematically retire their cryptographic debt and build resilience into their security architecture over time.

This proactive approach does more than mitigate emerging risk. It establishes a foundation of digital trust that is resilient against the threats of tomorrow, enabling your most sensitive intellectual property to remain secure for its entire shelf life, even as cryptographic standards evolve.

Secure Your First-Mover Advantage: The Quantum Readiness Assessment

Don’t let the complexity of the quantum transition stall your organization’s progress. Begin your path to resilience with a Quantum Readiness Assessment, a focused engagement to clarify current exposure and identify the most critical areas for action. To go deeper, watch the Quantum-Safe Summit on demand for expert perspectives on cryptographic risk and quantum readiness.

The Palo Alto Networks Quantum-Safe Security solution is expected to be generally available to customers on January 30, 2026, with additional integration enhancements planned for April 2026.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation, statements regarding the benefits, impact or performance or potential benefits, impact or performance of our products and technologies or future products and technologies. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and there are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this [blog. We identify certain important risks and uncertainties that could affect our results and performance in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and our other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from time-to-time, each of which are available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements in this blog are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we do not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.

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