Over the past year, vendor after vendor has reached the critical quantum-computing milestone where adding more qubits no longer adds a disproportionately higher amount of errors.
“For the first time, we can confidently say, the ‘zero to one’ moment has happened, and now we can look at scaling roadmaps instead of science roadmaps,” says Pranav Gokhale, vice president of quantum software at Infleqtion, which is focusing on the neutral atom approach to quantum computing.
It is similar to how fusion power reactors have been able to produce more energy than they use. Or the way a rocket hits escape velocity, says Gokhale. Infleqtion itself hit escape velocity this past December, he says, when its collaboration with Nvidia resulted in a six-fold improvement in accuracy.
Other companies that have recently hit escape velocity include Microsoft, Google, and QuEra, he says. (Read more: 10 quantum computing milestones of 2024)
For some companies, quantum computing is already here. Among 770 quantum computing researchers and professionals, 56% say that they’re already using quantum computing in their organization, according to a QuEra survey released in January. Of those, more than 80% say that they’re using it for scientific research and development, but another 50% are working on proofs of concept or pilot projects. In addition, 10% are using quantum computing operationally, though without positive ROI – and 4% are already reporting positive ROI.
Typically, the way this works is that companies combine quantum computing with traditional high-performance computing and AI, so that the quantum computers – which are still tiny – tackle just the small, key components of a bigger puzzle that only they can handle.
HorizonX Consulting and The Quantum Insider, a market intelligence firm, launched the Quantum Innovation Index in February, ranking enterprises on the degree to which they’ve adopted quantum computing. In the automotive sector, for example, BMW, Volkwagen, and Toyota are taking the lead. In finance, JPMorgan, HSBC and Goldman Sachs are the furthest along in quantum proofs of concept.
On the quantum computing vendor side, 39% expect their customers to be using quantum computers in production in 2026, according to an Omdia survey released in October. In addition, 14% expect their technology to be ready for production use in 2025 – and 4% said it was ready in 2024.
“A quantum computer is not simply a faster classical computer, just like a plane is not just a faster car. With a plane you can fly over the ocean. What are you going to do if you have flying abilities?” – Sridhar Tayur, Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.
Another sign that quantum computing is about to make a big impact on the world? In October, Chinese researchers used D-Wave’s quantum annealing computer to break RSA.
Before everyone panics, this was just a 22-bit key, not the 2048-bit keys commonly used in RSA encryption today, so it was more of a proof of concept than a quantum apocalypse. Still, Gartner predicts that, by 2029, most conventional asymmetric cryptography won’t be safe to use. In fact, quantum computing will force organizations to delete the majority of personal data rather than risk exposure, the research firm says.
But you don’t have to wait until 2029 for quantum decryption to be a threat because of “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks. Adversaries that can afford storage costs can vacuum up encrypted communications or data sets right now.
“The technology doesn’t exist to decrypt the data today,” says Doug Saylors, partner at ISG Research. “But they might be exfiltrating the data today and they can archive data streams… and they could potentially decrypt it later.”
1. Take cryptographic inventory
To get ahead of the quantum cryptography threat, companies should immediately start assessing their environment.
“What we’re advising clients to do – and working on with clients today – is first go and inventory your encryption algorithms and know what you’re using,” says Saylors. That can be tricky, he adds.
For example, asymmetric encryption – such as the public key exchange methods used to safeguard online communications – are most vulnerable to quantum decryption.
“But because of the way cryptography works, most organizations don’t know if, say, their Oracle databases are using symmetric or asymmetric encryption,” he says. “They don’t know what their Apache servers are doing.”
In addition, most encryption is layered, and includes both symmetric and asymmetric parts. A single credit card transaction could have 37 points of encryption, he says. “That’s a large number of touchpoints that most people don’t know exist – not even the IT professionals we talk to.”
2. Prioritize
Because of the complexity of the tasks, ISG’s Saylors suggest that enterprises prioritize their efforts. The first step, he says, is to look at perimeter security. The second step is to look at the encryption around the most critical assets. And the third step is to look at the encryption around data backups.
All of this needs to happen as soon as possible. In fact, according to Gartner, enterprises should have created a cryptography database by the end of 2024. Companies should have created cryptography polices and planned their transition to post-quantum encryption by the end of 2024, the research firm says.
“You should start today,” says Gartner analyst Mark Horvath. “It’s going to take longer than you think.”
All of today’s encryption will need to be replaced over the next five to seven years, Horvath says. “It seems easy to do but it’s actually catastrophic.”
3. Pursue cryptographic agility
Once companies have figured out which assets and communications they need to protect first, how do they actually go about switching to quantum-safe cryptography?
NIST released four algorithms in 2024, and more are expected to arrive soon. But enterprises shouldn’t just pick one of these algorithms and swap out all their old encryption.
First, the new algorithms aren’t a simple replacement for the old ones, says Gartner’s Horvath. “They don’t perform the same as the old ones do. Key generation times are different. Key sizes are different.”
So everything will have to be carefully tested and some cryptographic processes may need to be rearchitected. But the bigger problem is that the new algorithms might themselves be deprecated as technology continues to evolve.
Instead, Horvath and other experts recommend that enterprises pursue quantum agility. If any cryptography is hard-coded into processes, it needs to be separated out. “Make it so that any cryptography can work in there,” he says. “You don’t want to be dependent on any specific implementation.”
And a company might use different cryptography based on levels of risk, or based on whether partners and customers and platforms support particular standards. After all, not everyone will move forward with quantum-safe encryption at the same pace or with the same set of algorithms.
According to Gartner, companies should have started on their crypto agility police by the of 2024, start implementing it in 2024 and 2025, and have it in production by the end of 2027.
And, by 2027, companies should begin phasing out applications that can’t be upgraded to crypto agility and begin enforcing strong, safe cryptography for all data. One particular area that enterprises should pay attention to is IoT devices, says Aisling Dawson, an analyst at ABI Research.
“Those devices might exist for several years,” Dawson says. “Make sure those devices have post-quantum capabilities and make sure when you need to update them, that it can be done, other than having to rip and replace those devices.”
Another potential blind spot is SaaS applications, she says. “I can see that becoming a problem as companies might want to skirt admitting how far behind they are,” she says.
It can take money and personnel to fix encryption, and not all providers will have the resources or the interest in making it a priority.
On the plus side, there’s more than just customer demand forcing them to step up. Some jurisdictions, including Europe, are mandating changes. And the US federal government is requiring its vendors to have quantum-safe encryption in place by 2030, Dawson says.
4. Consider quantum key distribution
As an alternative to exchanging keys with quantum-safe encryption – or in addition to it – some companies are already experimenting with quantum key distribution. This is where quantum entanglement is used to send paired photons, either through space, as with quantum communication satellites, or through fiberoptic lines. If the communication is interfered with in any way, the entanglement breaks.
This is great for security, since nobody can listen in. But it’s bad for bandwidth and latency, since the individual photons can be knocked out of entanglement by heat, vibrations, or just by interacting with the fiberoptic cables themselves.
“There’s not enough entanglements per second – bandwidth – to send gigabits,” says Jim Ricotta, CEO and chairman at Aliro Quantum Technologies.
But encryption keys are, relatively speaking, pretty short, making them a good fit for the first quantum networks. “Keys are the number one use case,” says Ricotta. “Super secure sharing of keys.”
Companies that should be looking at quantum key distribution today are those most at risk of being hacked, or who have highly sensitive data, especially that of interest to state actors. “The machines are very affordable,” says Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research Inc.
There’s a lot of activity going on right now with quantum networking companies setting up links between different locations. “Investors are buying up data centers to create a Pony Express quantum signal to go coast-to-coast,” he says. “They’re buying up under-utilized or distressed assets.”
5. Identify quantum opportunities
Beyond quantum-safe encryption, and quantum key distribution, there’s quantum computing itself. While full-scale quantum computing is still a few years away, there are already areas in which the technology is showing value.
“If you’re in pharma or chemical industry, they’re using it already,” says Constellation’s Mueller. “You have to look into it,” Mueller warns.
And quantum computers are already playing an important role in protein folding, he says. “Quantum qubits are taking over traditional architectures for protein folding and mapping,” he says. “There, you must do something in 2025.”
According to a Boston Consulting Group projection from July of 2024 – from before the latest round of quantum computing breakthroughs – the technology will create between $450 and $850 billion of economic value globally by 2024.
Other experts are even more optimistic. A September report from The Quantum Insider, a market intelligence firm, forecasts that quantum computing will contribute $1 trillion in value creation by 2035. Finance, defense, life sciences, telecommunications, and manufacturing are expected to benefit the most from quantum technologies.
And when looking for opportunities, companies should do more than just think about the calculations that a quantum computer can do faster than a classical one, says Sridhar Tayur, professor of operations management at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.
“A quantum computer is not simply a faster classical computer, just like a plane is not just a faster car,” he says. “With a plane you can fly over the ocean. What are you going to do if you have flying abilities?”
The earliest use cases, according to Infeqtion’s Gokhale, lie in simulating physical processes.
Today, when a company needs to work with a physical process – say, developing a new kind of rubber for sneakers, or a new chemical or a new drug – a lot of time-consuming laboratory work is required. That’s because classical computers are limited in what kinds of physical processes they can simulate, and in how accurate they can be.
“All of that can shift to being computational,” Gokhale says. This has the potential to be very disruptive, he adds. “Any real-world process that can be simulated, will be simulated.” Drug discovery timelines can be dramatically compressed, he says, subject to government regulation.
Another use case for simulating physical processes is to generate training data for AI systems. This is already being done to a limited extent with classical computers. For example, robotics companies are doing early-stage training for the robots in virtual environments before finishing up the training in the real world. This use case can expand dramatically with quantum computing.
“A lot of tasks are bottlenecked by a shortage of training data,” Gokhale says.
6. Consider using classical computers to simulate quantum machines
Even for use cases where quantum computers aren’t yet ready for prime time, there might be value in simulating their capabilities, says Tayur. “You don’t have to keep waiting for the real machine,” he says. “You might be able to get something going now.”
There are two ways this can work. First, there are quantum-inspired algorithms, where the principles of quantum computing inspire novel approaches to hard problems. “We’re going to solve it with classical computers, but not the way we’d normally solve it,” he says.
Another is using classical computers to simulate quantum machines, running the same algorithms a company would run on quantum hardware. “Then, when a real quantum computer comes along, you just swap out the simulator for the real machine,” he says.
He recently worked with one hedge fund looking to solve an optimization problem, where the simulated quantum computer actually gave them better answers than what they were getting before.
7. Don’t forget quantum sensors
Speaking of quantum technologies that can already be put to work, quantum sensors are real and are being deployed. The same things that make quantum computers so unreliable, such as their sensitivity to heat, vibrations, and environmental noise of all kinds, makes them perfect for industrial sensors.
“Position, navigation and timing are common applications,” Eric Ostby, chief product officer at Aliro Quantum Technologies. “The US government has made proposals to increase the sensitivity and ability of navigational sensors to operate without GPS.”
This can be useful where GPS doesn’t work or isn’t reliable, he says – or in areas where GPS signals are being actively jammed, such as war zones. There are also biomedical applications of quantum sensors, he says, “for example, for imaging of the heart.”
8. Build quantum expertise
Companies that want to be early adopters should start developing quantum talent today, if they haven’t already.
“If you’re in financial services, defense, or logistics, or you have problems where you’re currently using Monte Carlo simulations or high performance computing, it’s probably worth your time to take some people and have them learn about quantum computing,” says Gartner’s Horvath. “Having someone on your staff who knows that they’re capable of doing and being able to identify a problem where a quantum computer can be useful is a big deal.”
But, except for the most cutting-edge companies, being able to actually run a quantum computer locally isn’t going to be necessary. “Most quantum companies have quantum computing as a service,” says Horvath. “With IBM, for example, you can go and just use one of their computers online.”
In addition, the big hyperscalers all offer cloud-based quantum computing access, partnering with multiple quantum hardware manufacturers so that enterprises can easily try out different quantum computers.
9. Build partnerships
The last step that enterprises can take today is to build partnerships with key players in the quantum computing space. That could be quantum computing manufacturing themselves and platform providers like hyperscalers. Pharma companies, for example, are hedging their bets, says Constellation’s Mueller, working with both hyperscale providers and individual quantum startups like Rigetti and D-Wave.
And then there are universities and other research firms, as well as consultants and other experts.
“Quantum technologies have the potential to transform nearly every industry, but harnessing that potential requires a breadth and depth of talent that is challenging to recruit and retain,” says Jordan Kenyon, chief scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton’s quantum practice.
Strategic partners can fill that gap, he says, and help companies adopt quantum technologies until they reach sufficient internal capacity themselves.