The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence ((NCCoE) has released a preliminary practice guide that makes a blunt case: waiting until quantum machines arrive is not an option. Migration to post-quantum cryptography will take years, and the clock is already ticking. According to the center’s preliminary draft guide, many of the algorithms that form the backbone of secure digital communications — including RSA, Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH), and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) — will be vulnerable once large-scale quantum computers are built. In its executive summary, NIST describes the scope of the threat in stark terms. Public-key algorithms — the mathematical tools that enable encrypted communications, secure digital signatures, and protected data exchange — were not built to withstand the parallel processing power of quantum systems. A quantum machine large enough to run Shor’s algorithm could effectively render RSA and elliptic curve cryptography obsolete. This would not just break web browsers and email servers. It would compromise the certificates that establish trust online, the hardware security modules that anchor identity in enterprises, and the encrypted data that businesses and governments have long assumed would remain private. Compounding the problem, NIST officials write, many organizations lack visibility into where and how cryptography is embedded in their systems. Applications, network protocols such as TLS and SSH, digital certificates, hardware modules, and third-party services all rely on cryptographic algorithms. Without a comprehensive inventory, businesses cannot know what is at risk or how to prioritize migration. Beyond awareness, the NIST project is launching hands-on testing. Initial workstreams will stress-test the first post-quantum algorithms against widely used protocols including TLS, SSH, QUIC, and X.509 digital certificates. Performance and interoperability evaluations will also extend to hardware security modules (HSMs), which play a central role in protecting keys and identities across enterprise systems. These early tests are critical because post-quantum algorithms differ from their classical predecessors in key size, signature size, error handling and execution steps.