The progress rate marks a steep acceleration. Since Peter Shor’s 1994 revelation, quantum computers could theoretically break RSA, resources have estimated to have plummeted – from 1 billion in 2012 to only 1 million today.
“Quantum computing will weaken asymmetric encryption into 2029,” warned Bart Willemsen, a Gartner VP analyst. Given that encryption upgrades often span years, he urged organizations to start strategic planning now, especially for infrastructure with hard-coded encryption dependencies. He noted that many developers lack a very familiarity with crypto libraries and hashing capabilities, making early inventory, performance testing and system mapping necessary for any realistic PQC roadmap.
Corporate safety meaning
For security leaders, the research highlights two direct priorities. First, encrypted communications using RSA or similar algorithms face the risk of an acute “storage now, decrypt later”, and once the quantum computer reaches a sufficient scale, the intercepted data can be decrypted. Google has implemented NIST-approved ML-KEM on Chrome and Internal Systems, establishing a benchmark for ensuring network traffic, VPN and messaging platforms.
