Ollie Omotosho | Director, Global Strategic Partnerships
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Ollie Omotosho | Director, Global Strategic Partnerships
More About This Author >
With the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) post-quantum cryptographic standard expected to be published this summer, companies need to start navigating the migration to quantum-safe cryptography. The most sustainable and effective way to make cryptosystems resilient for the quantum era is to establish cryptographic agility, or crypto-agility for short.
To help organizations embark on their post-quantum cryptography (“PQC”) readiness journey, Thales and IBM Consulting are working together to lead and guide industry leaders. Their latest collaboration includes the IBM Consulting “Quantum-Safe 360” transformation initiative, which enables and accelerates customer PQC readiness.
What is “IBM Quantum-Safe” Transformation?
As a leader and pioneer in Quantum computing, IBM Consulting provides Quantum Safe Transformation Services to help organizations delve deep into the quantum threat, assess its potential impact and lay out the foundations to keep sensitive data secure long-term, future-proofing the business against the emerging quantum technological threat.
Through a phased and iterative approach, IBM explains the needed strategies and tactical plans to successfully migrate to post-quantum cryptography. They can also provide consultative and managed services including:
- Advisory Services to help clients understand the security risks and implications, as well as pending compliance requirements, to proactively prepare organizations for this quantum revolution.
- Skilled Implementations of robust quantum-resistant solutions to safeguard sensitive data, especially for highly regulated industries such as Finance and Healthcare.
- Centers of Excellence built for your organization to scale the delivery of quantum-safe solutions across the enterprise and grow a quantum-safe ready workforce.
About the Quantum-Safe 360 Consortium
Given the complicated and extensive nature of these migratory endeavors, no one vendor alone can solve this challenge. Instead, teams will need to work with a variety of business partners. For this reason, IBM Consulting has formed a consortium to facilitate and accelerate PQC readiness with ready-made methodologies, tools, and testing labs. Thales is proud to be a featured technology partner in this IBM collaboration, along with Keyfactor and Quantinuum.
Each partner featured in the Quantum-Safe 360 Consortium is a market leader for their respective areas and helps enable Quantum-safe key generation and Quantum-ready PKI to meet the use case deployments such as VPN Tunnels, Code Signing, TLS Authentication, and Document Signing.
- Thales Luna HSMs protect applications and cryptographic keys to provide a secure root of trust for some of the most security-conscious organizations in the world by securely managing, processing, and storing encryption keys inside a crypto agile, FIPs-validated, hardened, and tamper-resistant device. Whereas the CipherTrust Data Security Platform offers various methods to centralize policy management and facilitate modern cryptographic techniques that resist quantum computing. These include libraries, frameworks, and elastic REST API-based microservices for secrets and key management. The platform also supports multi-cloud BYOK, HYOK, and Cloud-Native keys, as well as data masking, tokenization, and encryption.
- Quantinuum Quantum Origin generates provable quantum randomness for the strongest encryption to protect data, rapidly enhance cyber security systems without any code changes or additional hardware requirements.
- Keyfactor Enterprise EJBCA enables modern PKI platforms to large volumes of certificates at scale quickly, in any deployment model, and on-demand. Keyfactor Command provides full visibility, orchestration, and automation across the entire PKI and certificate landscape from one platform.
IBM Consulting "Quantum-Safe" Consortium Capabilities
Additionally, Thales together with Quantinuum has created a first-of-its-kind offering to help organizations test and prepare for post-quantum cryptography. The PQC Starter Kit incorporates Luna HSMs and Quantinuum’s quantum random number generation (QRNG) technology through which customers can ensure their keys are securely generated and stored while testing the PQC algorithms.
Conclusion
As a leading global technology and security provider, Thales is committed to ensuring a quantum-safe future. Through continuous innovations and investment across its portfolio, as well as in partnerships like the one with IBM Consulting, the company offers several quantum-ready and crypto-agile data security solutions to meet customer needs.