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Cloud providers are developing stronger quantum-ready encryption algorithms and post-quantum cryptography standards.
We are not very far away from a scenario where a quantum compute capability will outperform hundreds of data centres, and it will fit into the palm of our hand.
Satya Samal: We are already seeing rapid progress in this space. IBM Quantum Safe is an end-to-end solution designed to protect banks from future quantum threats to classical cryptography.
It is already available on IBM Cloud. Similarly, cloud providers are providing Quantum Computing as a Service.
Many of our hyperscaler partners: AWS, Azure, GCP and IBM Cloud are already doing this. Many clients have started to use these services to start their organisation is quantum adoption pathway.
Nelson Wootton: In reality, we are still at least a decade away from quantum computing being available and accessible to the mainstream market. However, its potential to utterly revolutionise computing can’ t be understated.
Quantum computing is likely to entirely change the way we communicate, with the potential for entangled qubits – an infinite space apart – able to share information in terms of state.
Furthermore, there are some things that quantum computing is uniquely positioned to revolutionise. For example, much of today’ s cryptography relies on complex mathematical problems.
The brute forcing of a solution to these problems is possible, but using today’ s computing approach would take hundreds or even thousands of years to run through all the possible permutations to find a solution and, therefore, decrypt some encrypted information.
Quantum computing though is capable of approaching these kinds of problems in an utterly revolutionary way and able to simultaneously try many solutions at once, thereby massively shortening the time it would take to brute force a cryptographic problem – potentially making today’ s cryptographic approaches obsolete.
However, right now, the environment needed to create an operating quantum computer is incredibly delicate, requiring a number of elements to be held at very close to absolute zero temperatures.
This, in turn, means that although this type of computing is coming, it will probably only be available via cloudstyle providers renting out time on quantum computers run by these institutions.
Much like the early days of computing, when mainframe computers were offered in a similar way. But over time( probably decades), this will become more accessible, cheaper and available to a wider audience.
106 April 2025