Most enterprises now have post-quantum cryptography initiatives underway. The problem is that very few have implemented quantum-safe protections across their infrastructure.
This gap was highlighted recently in a survey released by digital trust company DigiCert Inc. The report’s findings indicated that 87% of organizations were planning, testing or implementing post-quantum cryptography initiatives, while only 7% had deployed quantum-safe or hybrid cryptography across most of their digital certificates.
The survey offered one more example of the challenges ahead for enterprises seeking to protect critical systems in a world where cryptographic algorithms may become obsolete, leaving systems vulnerable to attack.
“Post-quantum migration will test enterprise resilience as much as cryptographic strength,” said theCUBE Research’s Krista Case. “Cryptography is deeply embedded across applications, infrastructure and critical business processes, often through dependencies organizations don’t fully understand. Crypto-agility gives enterprises a way to discover, prioritize and change those dependencies without putting business operations at risk. That capability needs to be built before quantum risk becomes an operational deadline.”
Agents in post-quantum world
With the rapid adoption of enterprise artificial intelligence, DigiCert has been focused on a new AI Trust architecture to help organizations secure AI systems and their outputs, along with new capabilities to help secure autonomous agents and artificial intelligence models. In April, the company introduced a unified trust layer that spans AI agents, models and content and embeds cryptographic verification across the AI lifecycle.
Rapid adoption of AI agents by enterprises has added new complexity to the security picture as organizations prepare for the demands of post-quantum cryptography. Reliance on agents for key enterprise tasks has increased the need for identity-based governance for autonomous systems and ways to validate model integrity.
As part of DigiCert’s AI Agent Trust initiative, the company also offers AI Agent Passport, which allows organizations to define exactly what an agent can access, what it can do and where it can operate, creating enforceable, auditable boundaries for autonomous actions.
“Agentic AI represents an architectural shift from human-speed identity and security to autonomous systems operating at machine speed,” said theCUBE Research’s John Furrier. “Identity becomes the new control plane, but identity alone isn’t enough. Enterprises need cryptographically verifiable trust that establishes who an agent represents, what it’s authorized to do and whether that authority can be trusted across organizational boundaries. DigiCert’s Agent Passport approach brings proven internet-scale trust principles into this emerging agentic architecture.”
Shift from awareness to implementation
As enterprises modernize applications and embed AI across the software development life cycle, cryptographic dependencies are becoming more distributed, automated and difficult to inventory. TheCUBE Research’s AppDev findings show that 75% of enterprises use multiple disparate tools across their development lifecycle, highlighting the complexity and inefficiency organizations already face in managing modern software environments.
