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Blog | Mar 31, 2026

Quantum-Ready in Hours, Not Years

By Khalid Raza, President & Founder, Graphiant


Your applications are being harvested right now. Not hacked, not breached in the traditional sense. Collected. Stored. Held until a quantum computer arrives that can open the lock.

This is the Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL) threat, and it is not a future risk on a roadmap. Nation-state adversaries are pulling encrypted enterprise traffic off the wire today, at scale, and archiving it. The quantum computer that decrypts it does not need to exist yet. The collection is already underway.

The question enterprises need to answer is not whether to address quantum security. The question is whether they are going to take years to do it while the archive grows, or hours.

The Scale of the Exposure

The average large enterprise runs somewhere between 400 and 600 applications. 

SaaS platforms. 

Custom-built internal tools. 

Partner APIs. 

Cloud workloads across AWS, Azure, and GCP. 

Every one of them transmits encrypted traffic. Nearly all of them rely on TLS 1.2 to do it.

According to Qualys SSL Labs 2024 data, 99.9% of servers on the internet still support TLS 1.2. That makes it the default state of enterprise networking, not some legacy edge case. 

TLS 1.2 is fully vulnerable to a quantum computer running Shor's algorithm. The encryption protecting those 400-600 applications, every internal data flow, every cloud connection, every B2B partner exchange, offers no resistance to a sufficiently powerful quantum system.

The Conventional Answer Doesn't Fit the Timeline

The accepted response to this problem is post-quantum cryptography migration at the application layer. Replace TLS 1.2 across the portfolio with NIST-standardized PQC algorithms. It is the right long-term answer. The timeline is the problem.

NIST's own deadline for federal systems is 2035. Historical cryptographic migrations, including the SHA-1 to SHA-256 transition, took over a decade across enterprise environments. PQC is a more complex change. Independent estimates put typical enterprise application-level PQC migration at three to seven years, and most large organizations will not finish before 2030 to 2032 at the earliest.

The harvest is happening now. The migration is years away. That gap is the exposure.

Network-Layer Protection as an Immediate Fix

Graphiant closes the gap without requiring a single line of application code to change.

Graphiant's NaaS architecture places a stateless core at the center of the enterprise network, with lightweight edge nodes on commodity hardware or software at every site, cloud on-ramp, and partner connection point. Every packet that traverses the Graphiant fabric gets wrapped in NIST-standardized post-quantum encryption at the network layer.

Because Graphiant operates as a network-layer proxy, it extends immediate quantum-safe protection across the entire traffic portfolio: internal app-to-app and user-to-app flows across the WAN, cloud connectivity to AWS, Azure, and GCP regardless of the application's TLS version, partner and B2B API traffic even when the partner is still running legacy TLS 1.2, and SaaS and internet-bound traffic through PQC-secured tunnels in Graphiant's stateless fabric.

The applications themselves do not need to be updated. The protection is applied beneath them, at the network layer, where Graphiant already operates.

Deployment in Hours

Graphiant's stateless core and lightweight CPE architecture is built for rapid deployment at enterprise scale without hardware replacement cycles. Automated onboarding provisions a new site in under 60 seconds. PQC proxy protection goes live across the full network in hours, not quarters.

The development teams running those 400-600 applications get the time they actually need to execute a proper application-level migration, with the HNDL attack surface eliminated in the meantime.

That is the core logic: deploy the network-layer fix now, run the application migration on a realistic schedule, and stop adding to the adversary's archive while you work.

What to Do with This

The threat timeline and the migration timeline do not align. Waiting for application-level PQC readiness means operating with a growing exposure for years. Network-layer protection through Graphiant is available now, deploys without disruption, and protects everything traversing the fabric automatically.

The harvest is already underway. The architecture to stop it is available today.