Post quantum readiness has moved from theory to boardroom priority. Kevin Hilscher, Senior Director of Product Management at DigiCert, joins Alan Shimel to unpack DigiCert's 2026 Post Quantum Readiness Outlook, the NIST 2030 and 2035 deadlines, and the awareness to execution cliff facing enterprise security teams.

About Kevin Hilscher

Kevin leads all things post quantum at DigiCert, from platform enablement for ML-DSA and ML-KEM to new PQC products and customer transition planning. Consequently, he has a front row seat to how the industry is actually preparing.

Inside the Post Quantum Readiness Outlook

Customers used to say quantum was not on the near-term horizon. As a result, DigiCert built out early support for the new NIST algorithms, launched DigiCert Labs for free PQC certificate downloads and updated its own crypto libraries. Meanwhile, awareness has jumped to 85 to 87 percent of enterprises taking this seriously.

In addition, the survey shows a sharp cliff between awareness and execution. Therefore, the next chapter is discovery, funding, program spin-up and dealing with the real complexity of upgrading web servers, OS trust stores, OpenSSL, Apache, NGINX and Kubernetes together.

Why this matters now

Meanwhile, harvest now decrypt later is already happening, D-Wave is moving its headquarters to Boca Raton and NIST has locked in the 2030 and 2035 dates. Consequently, enterprise teams cannot afford to leave post quantum readiness on next year's roadmap.

Explore more cybersecurity coverage and the latest TechStrong TV interviews. Furthermore, the free 2026 outlook, vertical benchmarks for finance, med tech, telecom, media and retail, and World Quantum Readiness Day this September are all on digicert.com.

For more information please visit digicert.com