For the past few years, post-quantum cryptography has been a planning topic: something to track, budget for eventually, and revisit once standards settled. New research suggests that window of comfortable awareness is closing. Organizations are now in the harder phase of actually doing the work, and the work is revealing just how deep the dependencies run.
Sectigo’s 2026 State of Crypto Agility Report, based on a Censuswide survey of 500 senior IT and cybersecurity decision-makers worldwide, finds that 78% of respondents expect public key infrastructure (PKI) to change to a great or very great extent to support post-quantum cryptography (PQC). That is a striking number for a technology most enterprises treat as plumbing. PKI underpins certificates, authentication, encrypted communications, code signing and machine identity. When the cryptography beneath it changes, everything built on top of it has to be ready.
From awareness to execution
The survey suggests that many organizations have stopped debating whether to prepare. Thirty-eight percent say they have fully assessed which of their systems are vulnerable to quantum attacks, up from 14% a year earlier, and another 44% describe their assessments as mostly complete. Budget is following: 83% have money allocated to quantum-readiness initiatives over the next year, and among those with a budget, 93% expect PQC spending to rise over the next two to three years.
A caveat applies to those year-over-year comparisons. The 2026 sample was expanded to include the Asia-Pacific region, so the report’s authors treat the trend lines as directional rather than precise. Even so, the direction is clear.
Nick France, Sectigo’s CTO, frames the shift this way: organisations have moved from asking whether they need to prepare to confronting what that preparation actually requires. In his view, PQC is not simply an algorithm swap, and shorter certificate lifespans are not simply a renewal problem. Both force a rethink of how cryptographic infrastructure is discovered, managed and adapted across public and private PKI environments.
Why PQC is an architecture problem
The reason PQC cannot be treated as a drop-in replacement is practical. Post-quantum keys and signatures are larger than today’s, and they can behave differently in transit and in validation. The systems that issue, transport, validate and manage them have to adapt along with the algorithms.
The report points to Merkle Tree Certificates, a proposed certificate architecture under development at the Internet Engineering Task Force, as one example of the architectural thinking now underway. It also shows how much ground remains. Among respondents who are familiar with the MTC proposal, only 40% say they clearly understand what their systems, processes and environments would need to change in order to support it. For CIOs, that gap between familiarity and understanding is worth noting, because architectural shifts of this kind tend to surface late and expensively when they are not scoped early.
The certificate clock is already ticking
While PQC is a transformation on the horizon, shorter certificate lifespans are a test of operational readiness today. The maximum validity period for publicly trusted SSL/TLS certificates dropped from 398 days to 200 days in March 2026. It is scheduled to fall to 100 days in March 2027 and to 47 days in March 2029.
The data shows meaningful progress. Sixty-two percent of respondents report a complete, up-to-date inventory of their public SSL/TLS certificates, more than double the 28% reported in 2025. Forty percent say they are very prepared for monthly renewals because automated systems are already in place, compared with 19% last year. And 73% plan to increase certificate-management automation specifically because of shorter lifespans.
Yet the same survey delivers a sobering counterpoint: 61% of respondents experienced a certificate-related outage or incident in the past 12 months. Better visibility, more automation and bigger budgets are all encouraging, but they have not yet translated into resilience. As the pace of change accelerates, each newly discovered dependency or architectural constraint becomes more consequential.
France argues that organisations can no longer manage cryptography as static infrastructure, and that the goal should be to make it boring again. As algorithms, standards and requirements evolve, he says, teams need to adapt without turning every cryptographic transition into a major operational event.
In practice, that means moving from awareness to operations that are repeatable, testable and scalable. The approach he describes rests on continuous cryptographic discovery, risk prioritization, migration planning and governed change, applied across both public and private PKI.