Disaster Recovery Journal Winter 2025

How Quantum Computing Will Expose Data Long Thought Secure, and What Resilience Leaders Must Do Before It’s Too Late The Quantum Countdown: Why Today’s Encryption Is Already at Risk

“rainy day” will arrive the moment quantum computers become powerful enough to rip through RSA, ECC, and Diffie-Hellman encryption like tissue paper. You won’t even know it happened. We trust encryption blindly. We assume our HTTPS connections, email servers, encrypted backups, and VPNs are untouchable. That assumption is our Achilles’ heel. We’ve built our digital civilization on algorithms with expiration dates—and the clock is ticking. The Quantum Edge: Why Today’s Encryption Doesn’t Stand a Chance Quantum computing doesn’t just make things faster—it changes the rules entirely. Our current encryption schemes rely on problems so complex, even supercomputers would need millions of years to solve them. That’s been our safety net—until now.

By JOHN HILL W hile organizations obsess over ransomware, phishing, and insider threats, a far more devastating storm is quietly brewing. Nation-states and cybercriminals are stealing encrypted data right now, banking on one terrifying bet: quantum computing will shatter encryption wide open.

protected will become public. It’s called “harvest now, decrypt later”—and it’s the ticking time bomb for which almost no one is prepared. Harvest Now, Decrypt Later: The Silent War Has Already Started This isn’t speculation—it’s happening in real time. Threat actors are intercepting encrypted emails, VPN tunnels, SSL sessions, and backup archives. They’re quietly sweeping up everything they can get their hands on and shelving it for a rainy day. That

When that day comes—sooner than most realize—what you assumed was

12 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | WINTER 2025