Imagine you run a bank. You spend every day working with various business groups dealing with digital transformation needs, geopolitical upheaval and day-to-day operational resilience. One day, a decision needs to be made about whether to dedicate a large chunk of the IT budget to fighting a potentially existential security threat that may appear in around six years. This eventuality exists only as part of a theoretical algorithm devised by an applied maths professor in 1994.
Global banks, central regulatory authorities, as well as most sovereign governments are indeed dedicating a large chunk of resources to prepare and protect against this threat. The threat being that a quantum computer will be built that can calculate such an algorithm, which would then be able to crack most of the world’s cryptographic security systems.
