The First Quantum Budgeting Cycle
Why 2026 is the year CISOs must fund quantum readiness or explain why they didn’t
Qryptonic Research LLC
Dec 30, 2025
Why this matters now
For most of the past decade, quantum risk was acknowledged but not quantified. Discussed but not owned. It lived in a space that was convenient for organizations: important enough to reference, distant enough to defer.
That convenience ended in 2025.
Not because quantum computers suddenly broke encryption, but because the assumptions that made delay defensible lost credibility. Migration timelines hardened. Standards finalized. Vendor roadmaps narrowed. And the gap between cryptographic lifespan and data lifespan became impossible to ignore.
As organizations finalize 2026 budgets, quantum risk has crossed a threshold. It is no longer a future research concern. It is a present-day governance issue with long remediation timelines and accumulating exposure.
That makes 2026 the first true quantum budgeting cycle.
What changed between planning and budgeting
Planning tolerates uncertainty. Budgets do not.
In 2025, three developments converged that pushed quantum risk out of abstract planning and into financial decision-making.
First, migration timelines stopped being speculative. Federal guidance and national security frameworks describe post-quantum migration as a multi-year effort once discovery, testing, vendor coordination, and remediation are included. The specific timelines vary by environment, but the direction is consistent: you do not “bolt on” post-quantum readiness in a single budget year.¹
Second, vendor timelines compressed the buffer. IBM’s publicly posted roadmap frames a “first fault-tolerant quantum computer” milestone in the 2029 timeframe, with scaled fault-tolerant capability targets thereafter. Even if timelines slip, the overlap with enterprise migration windows is now hard to dismiss.²
Third, public technical leadership clarified what’s at stake without hype. Google’s Quantum AI team published results and commentary describing below-threshold error correction on its Willow processor and the path error correction opens. It is not a claim of imminent cryptographic collapse. It is an explicit marker of sustained, measurable progress.³
Together, these shifts changed the executive question.
Not “should we think about quantum?”
But “what are we funding in 2026, and what evidence will that funding produce?”
Why deferring funding is no longer neutral
In prior years, not funding quantum readiness could be framed as prudence. The work felt premature. The outcomes felt distant.
In 2026, deferral carries its own risk profile.
Every year without funded discovery increases uncertainty about cryptographic exposure. Every year without vendor engagement increases dependence on opaque encryption decisions. Every year without data classification expands the volume of long-lived data at risk. Every year without testing increases the chance that remediation collides with active threat.
Funding does not mean solving quantum risk in one year. It means starting work that cannot be compressed later.
That distinction is gaining traction in boardrooms.
What boards are actually funding in 2026
Across financial services, healthcare, critical infrastructure, and regulated technology sectors, a consistent pattern has emerged. Organizations moving first are not funding “quantum projects.” They are funding foundational capabilities that make readiness possible.
Five categories dominate 2026 budgets.
1. Cryptographic discovery and inventory
Visibility comes first.
Most enterprises still lack a system-level view of which cryptographic algorithms, protocols, libraries, and key exchanges protect data across production, backup, and disaster-recovery environments.
This gap is operational, not theoretical.
In Qryptonic’s 2025 field work, organizations repeatedly found meaningful cryptographic exposure sitting in places security teams did not inventory as cryptography: vendor-controlled middleware, legacy integration layers, replication workflows, and DR environments.
Budgets are funding discovery because without it, every downstream decision is assumption-driven.
2. Long-lived data classification
The second funding priority is about time.
Quantum risk is defined by the mismatch between how long data must remain confidential and how long classical cryptography can plausibly protect it.
Prepared organizations are funding structured classification of regulated financial records with multi-year retention requirements, healthcare records often retained for years to decades under HIPAA and state law variation, legal archives and evidentiary data with long or indefinite lifespans, and intellectual property and research data with multi-decade value.⁴
This work rarely fits neatly into existing data governance programs. It requires coordination between security, legal, compliance, and records management teams.
Funding this in 2026 narrows exposure before remediation even begins.
3. Reality-based cryptographic stress testing
The third category moves beyond documentation.
Traditional security tooling does not model quantum-class failure modes. Vulnerability scanners and SIEM platforms log cryptographic behavior but do not interpret downgrade paths, algorithm fragility, or handshake failure as systemic risk.
Organizations budgeting effectively are funding live cryptographic stress testing that evaluates how production systems behave when TLS handshakes are forced into weaker states under load, or when key-exchange assumptions are tested against real operational pathways.
This work often reveals exposure in systems previously considered “secure” because cryptography was treated as configuration, not an attack surface.
4. Vendor and supply-chain cryptography oversight
The fourth funding area reflects a hard reality.
Your quantum readiness is only as strong as your least migrated vendor.
In 2026, more organizations are allocating budget to request and review post-quantum roadmaps from critical suppliers, identify where encryption choices are controlled externally, assess SaaS, cloud, and managed platforms for cryptographic opacity, and introduce quantum-related language into contracts and renewals.
This work sits between security, procurement, and legal. Without explicit funding, it does not happen. With funding, it becomes one of the highest-leverage risk reductions available.
5. Program governance and assurance artifacts
The final category is the one boards care about most.
Evidence.
Boards, regulators, insurers, and partners are not asking for promises. They want documentation showing what was discovered, what was tested, which data carries priority, what remediation is planned, how progress will be measured, and who owns the program.
Organizations are budgeting explicitly for the creation of quantum assurance files. These are governance artifacts, not marketing summaries, designed to withstand scrutiny.
A necessary counterweight
Not every organization faces identical urgency.
Some industries contend with immediate ransomware exposure, staffing shortages, or regulatory remediation that justifiably dominate budgets. Funding decisions are always trade-offs.
But one constraint applies universally: migration timelines do not compress.
Organizations that phase quantum readiness are not wrong. Organizations that assume they can start late and finish fast are.
That is what makes 2026 different.
How Qryptonic supports this work
Quantum readiness cuts across cryptography, architecture, governance, vendor oversight, and regulatory expectation.
Qryptonic supports enterprises by mapping cryptographic usage and downgrade paths that traditional tools overlook, identifying quantum-adjacent weaknesses buried in operational complexity, designing post-quantum roadmaps aligned to NIST standards and national guidance, and producing assurance files that boards, regulators, and insurers can rely on.
The objective is consistent.
Replace uncertainty with visibility.
Replace visibility with governance.
Conclusion
Quantum readiness did not become urgent because quantum computers suddenly appeared.
It became urgent because organizations reconciled three facts:
Migration takes longer than comfort allows.
Exposure accumulates faster than expected.
Evidence matters more than intent.
The 2026 budget is where strategy becomes accountable.
CISOs will not be judged on whether they solved quantum risk in one year. They will be judged on whether they funded the work required to solve it.
That is what makes this the first quantum budgeting cycle.
For a copy of the study
For a copy of Qryptonic’s quantum threat analysis, visit
https://www.qryptonic.com/contact
Ready to prove post-quantum readiness?
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Legal and Non-Reliance Disclaimer
This publication is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or technical advice. Qryptonic Research, LLC makes no representations regarding accuracy or completeness. Readers should not rely on this material as a substitute for independent due diligence, formal assessments, or regulatory obligations. References to third parties do not imply endorsement.
Copyright © 2025 Qryptonic Research, LLC. All rights reserved.
Footnotes
OMB Memorandum M-23-02, “Migrating to Post-Quantum Cryptography,” Nov 18, 2022 (agency inventories and migration planning requirements). Accessed Dec 2025.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/M-23-02-M-Memo-on-Migrating-to-Post-Quantum-Cryptography.pdfIBM Quantum, “IBM Quantum Roadmap” (public roadmap with fault-tolerant milestones including the 2029 target and scaling targets thereafter). Accessed Dec 2025.
https://www.ibm.com/roadmaps/quantum/Acharya et al., “Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold,” Nature, published online (Willow results), and Google Research blog, “Making quantum error correction work,” Dec 9, 2024. Accessed Dec 2025.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y
https://research.google/blog/making-quantum-error-correction-work/U.S. HHS, HIPAA compliance resources and professional guidance. Accessed Dec 2025.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/index.html
This is such a critical framing of the issue! The shift from "quantum is someday" to "quantum is this fiscal year" really lands when you line up the migration timelines against vendor roadmaps. I've been tracking cryptographic discovery work across a few orgs, and the inventory gap you mentioned is real, especially in backup and DR enviroments where nobody thinks to look. The point about deferral no longer beeing neutral is gonna hit hard in boardrooms once compliance starts asking for assurance artifacts.