Harvest Now, Read Now: The Immediate Overlooked Risk Beneath The PQC Discussion

InnovationHarvest Now, Read Now: The Immediate Overlooked Risk Beneath The PQC DiscussionByKarim Eldefrawy,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 11, 2026, 06:15am EDTKarim Eldefrawy is Co-founder & CTO of Confidencial. He has 25+ years of experience in cybersecurity and 100+ published scientific works. gettyThe post-quantum timeline just got harder to ignore—from two directions at once. On March 25, 2026, Google set an accelerated 2029 timeline for migrating to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Google’s justification for such acceleration is that progress in quantum hardware and error correction now warrants this new urgency. Days later, a team of reputable Caltech researchers published a paper theorizing that Shor’s (factoring) algorithm can be executed with roughly 10,000 physical qubits on a reconfigurable neutral-atom architecture. This new estimate of 10,000 physical qubits is a dramatic reduction from prior estimates requiring millions. Their analysis shows 256-bit elliptic curves could be broken in 10 days with 26,000 qubits, and factoring based RSA-2048 in one-two orders of magnitude longer. We’re now in a situation where over two decades, qubit requirements for cryptographically relevant factoring dropped by 10,000x.The importance of these developments must not be overlooked. But I argue that many enterprises are still framing the transition too narrowly. Yes, harvest now, decrypt later (HNDL) is real; adversaries can steal encrypted data today and wait for quantum advances to unlock it. Google says exactly that, calling out “store-now-decrypt-later” as a present threat. And the new qubit estimates make that threat timeline feel considerably shorter. But beneath that conversation sits a more immediate and more dangerous reality: harvest now, read now.Too much sensitive enterprise data is already...