By David Canellos, CEO, Axiad
Episode 1 of The PQC Playbook, a short-form series answering the practical questions security leaders are wrestling with as PQC moves from research project to operational program.
PQC Is No Longer a Research Project
If you've been tracking the recent executive order, the NIST standards, or conversations coming out of Identiverse, RSA, and other industry events, you've probably reached the same conclusion: post-quantum cryptography migration is no longer a theoretical exercise.
It's an operational program. And most organizations are about to start it with the wrong question.
The Wrong Question Most Teams Ask First
When security teams kick off a PQC initiative, the first question is almost always: "Which algorithms do we replace?"
That question is backwards.
Before you can replace your cryptography, you have to understand what cryptography you actually have. And if you can't answer that with confidence, you cannot build a credible migration plan.
Start Here: What Cryptography Do I Actually Have?
Think about your own environment for a moment.
You have applications, APIs, cloud workloads, Kubernetes clusters, network devices, laptops, and web servers. Every one of them depends on cryptography in a different way: certificates, keys, TLS, SSH, mutual TLS, service-to-service authentication.
Now ask yourself: Who owns it?
Most organizations can't answer that with confidence. That's exactly where PQC projects begin to struggle, and it has nothing to do with the complexity of the algorithms. It has everything to do with environment visibility.
If your team is still mapping what you have, see how Axiad approaches PQC readiness assessment →
Inventory Is Not Enough. Context Is.
When people hear "inventory your cryptography," they picture a spreadsheet with ten, twenty, or thirty thousand certificates. That's a start. But inventory alone is not the goal.
Context is.
The questions that actually drive a migration plan look like this:
Those are the questions that determine where your migration begins, because you have to understand the business impact of replacing cryptography before you can prioritize what to replace first.
Today's Takeaway
PQC is not an algorithm problem first. It's a visibility problem.
You can't prioritize what you can't see, and you can't migrate what you don't understand.
Organizations that jump straight to algorithm replacement without establishing cryptographic visibility will find themselves stalled, or flying blind and creating new risk in the process of reducing it.
This is the challenge Axiad helps organizations solve. The Axiad platform gives security teams a continuous, context-rich view of their cryptographic environment, so the path from inventory to migration plan becomes actionable rather than overwhelming. Explore our PQC Readiness solution →
What's Next
In Episode 2 of The PQC Playbook, David tackles the next practical question: What does crypto agility actually mean, and why is it much harder than replacing cryptographic algorithms?
The PQC Playbook is produced by Axiad. David Canellos is CEO of Axiad, helping enterprises manage cryptographic assets and accelerate quantum-safe migrations with visibility, context, and control.