Nearly every post-quantum conversation carries an unstated assumption: when the time comes to act, it will be obvious. There will be a headline, a milestone, a signal strong enough to remove doubt.

That assumption feels reasonable.
It is also wrong.

Post-quantum risk does not arrive as an event. It accumulates.

Data collected today is stored, copied, backed up, and archived under cryptographic assumptions made years earlier. By the time urgency feels undeniable, exposure already exists. Organizations that began formal cryptographic inventories in 2024 routinely discovered far more encrypted assets than expected. The problem was not weak encryption. It was a lack of visibility.

That is what makes post-quantum planning uncomfortable. It requires action before certainty, not after.

Waiting for standards to settle feels prudent, but in cryptography, delay is rarely neutral. While discussions continue, adversaries keep collecting data. While internal alignment drags on, long-lived secrets continue aging under assumptions no one believes will hold indefinitely.

The organizations that navigate this well do not wait for clarity. They distinguish between decisions that can be reversed and those that cannot, and they act accordingly.

Choosing an algorithm is reversible.
Choosing to postpone the conversation while sensitive data continues to accumulate is not.

The real danger is not that quantum capability arrives suddenly. It is the belief that there will be time to react when it does. By the time decryption becomes practical, the data that matters most is already old and already somewhere else.