Quantum readiness for health boards and executives: what to do now, what can wait

Why this significantly impacts healthcare

Most cyber threats are a concern as soon as the breach occurs. A future of quantum-based attacks is different. Adversaries can harvest your data now, store it in its encrypted format, and unlock it once technology is more advanced.

For a bank, much of the harvested data ages out. A card number gets reissued, a password gets rotated. Healthcare does not work that way.

You can re-issue a credit card. You cannot re-issue a patient's medical history.

A person's diagnoses, genetic information, mental health records and immunisation history stay sensitive for their whole life, and sometimes their family's. ASD's own triage guidance singles out data with "long-lived confidentiality requirements" as the first thing to protect. In healthcare, that is most of what you hold.

A second trap is your equipment. Infusion pumps, imaging systems and other connected medical devices run for ten to fifteen years and cannot always be patched. Some of what you buy this year will still be running, on its original cryptography, when the deadline arrives. That makes today's procurement a quantum decision, whether you frame it that way or not.

A third trap is the one most boards have not checked: insurance. Harvest now, decrypt later breaks the usual pattern of a cyber claim. The data leaves tonight, but the breach you must notify, and the harm to patients, may not surface for years, possibly after the policy has lapsed or renewed. Cyber policies are often written on a "claims made" basis, so a loss that crystallises long after the theft can fall into a gap. Do not assume you are covered. Ask your broker and insurer in writing whether the policy responds to data taken now and exploited years later, and consider an independent legal review of the terms. This is a question for your advisers, but one the board should make sure has been asked.

What the executive team should do now

ASD frames the transition in five phases it calls LATICE: locate, assess, triage, implement, and communicate and educate. The early phases are where executive effort belongs this year.

1. Start the cryptographic inventory

You cannot protect what you cannot see. Commission a cryptographic bill of materials, or CBOM. This is not a list of your sensitive data; it is a list of the locks: which encryption methods each system, application, cloud service and device uses. You need it because the quantum fix means replacing specific vulnerable algorithms, so you first have to find them. Start simple, even just the critical security functions you depend on. Mapping your high-risk data is a separate exercise, and comes next.

2. Put post-quantum clauses in every contract and renewal

The highest-leverage, lowest-cost move available today. From now on, every procurement, renewal and new medical device should ask the vendor how and when they will deliver post-quantum cryptography aligned to the ASD Information Security Manual. You are not buying anything new. You are refusing to lock yourself into another decade of obsolete encryption. ASD has now published the questions to ask, and they are set out below.

3. Map your long-lived sensitive data

The data inventory, companion to the CBOM. Identify the data with the longest confidentiality life: patient records, genomic data, research, anything kept for decades. That is your harvest-now-decrypt-later target list. Overlay it on the CBOM to see which vulnerable locks sit in front of your most sensitive data. That overlap sets your priority order.

4. Set the end-2026 plan milestone

ASD suggests a refined transition plan by the end of this year. Make it a board-visible milestone with a named owner, a budget line and the inventory feeding into it. A plan is not the work done; it means you know your starting position and priority order.

5. Stand up the working group and report up

Quantum readiness touches the whole organisation, so it needs a small cross-functional group, not a single overworked security chief (the CISO, your most senior cyber security executive). Which executive is accountable will vary, but the group should bring together ICT, security, procurement, clinical engineering, risk, health information management (HIM), privacy and clinical leadership. One executive sponsors it and reports to the board against the 2026, 2028 and 2030 milestones. Treat it like your cyber incident response: owned at the executive table, not buried in the ICT backlog.

What to ask your vendors

On 16 July 2026 ASD published Post-quantum questions to ask your vendors, a vendor-neutral question set for procurement, contract renewals and vendor assurance. It closes the gap in the advice above. It tells you what "ask the vendor about post-quantum" actually sounds like in a contract conversation.

This lands harder in health than in most sectors. ASD singles out environments where cryptography is embedded, difficult to update and tied to long asset lifecycles: operational technology, Internet of Things, building management systems, and physical access and security systems. Read that as your infusion pumps, your imaging fleet, nurse call, theatre systems, badge readers and the building itself. In vendor-managed and cloud services, ASD makes the point plainly: the vendor controls the cryptography, not you. Their readiness becomes your readiness.

ASD is explicit that you are not expected to ask every question of every vendor. Apply them according to the risk of the product, how much of the cryptography the vendor controls, how sensitive and long-lived the data is, and how far along your own transition is. The questions below are the subset that bite hardest in healthcare. The full set is in the ASD publication.

Locate: what cryptography is actually in there

• Do you maintain a current inventory of cryptographic dependencies, such as a cryptographic bill of materials (CBOM) or equivalent?
• Is any cryptography hardcoded, fixed or hardware bound?
• How is cryptography updated?
• Are firmware and boot processes updatable to support post-quantum signature schemes?

The middle two decide whether a device is a patch or a purchase. A vendor who cannot update the firmware signing chain is telling you that device is a hardware replacement, and that belongs in the capital plan, not the security backlog.

Assess: whose data, and for how long

• Which customer data flows rely on traditional asymmetric cryptography?
• What data lifetime assumptions does your product or service make for the data it processes or stores, and how can we configure or manage those lifetimes?
• Do you have a documented, product-specific assessment of the risks posed by a cryptographically relevant quantum computer?
• Can customers choose stronger cryptographic settings today?

The data lifetime question is harvest now, decrypt later translated into procurement language. A vendor whose product assumes data ages out in seven years has not designed for a record that stays sensitive for eighty.

Triage: will it be ready in time

• Which products or services will be post-quantum ready early enough to support our rollout before the end of 2030?
• Which components require hardware replacement or re-architecture?
• Do you support post-quantum and traditional hybrid modes as a temporary transition mechanism, and how and when will you move to post-quantum only?
• What internal governance arrangements oversee your post-quantum transition?

Hybrid modes are a bridge, not a destination. ASD does not prohibit them, but a quantum computer renders the traditional half obsolete, so a vendor treating hybrid as the finish line has stopped halfway.

Implement: is it real yet, and what does it cost

• Which post-quantum cryptographic algorithms will you support, and when will support be generally available to customers?
• Is your post-quantum implementation production-ready and available for customer use?
• How will key management, certificate sizes and lifecycle processes change?
• Is post-quantum cryptography included in base licensing?

The licensing question is the sharp one, and it is the question nobody thinks to ask. ASD lists the treatment of post-quantum cryptography as an optional or premium function among the warning signs in vendor responses. If meeting a national deadline turns out to be an upsell, you have just found a cost your 2028 budget does not carry.

Communicate: what happens after the sale

• How are customers notified of cryptographic changes?
• How will traditional cryptography be deprecated, including any temporary use of hybrid approaches?
• Does your roadmap align with ASD guidance and support transition by the end of 2030?

What a weak answer sounds like

ASD names seven patterns worth a second look: limited visibility of cryptographic use; reliance on general assurances; unclear or deferred transition timelines; use of proprietary or opaque cryptography; treatment of post-quantum cryptography as an optional or premium function; over-reliance on compensating controls; and a lack of governance or ownership.

None of these is automatically disqualifying, and ASD is careful to say so. The more useful signal is whether a vendor will engage transparently, name its constraints and show progress. A vendor who says "we do not know yet, here is who owns it and when we will tell you" is in better shape than one who answers "we are quantum-safe." The first has a governance problem you can track. The second has a marketing department.

What the board should require

The board does not run the transition. Its job is to make sure the transition is real, resourced and on a deadline, the same governance discipline it already applies to clinical risk. These things belong on the board's agenda:

• A named accountable executive. One person owns quantum readiness end to end, just as one person owns incident response. The right role varies by organisation, it may be the CIO, the CISO, the Privacy Officer, the Health Information Management (HIM) executive or another leader, but the accountability must sit with a named individual. If no name comes back, that is your first finding.
• An ASD-aligned plan by the end of 2026, with funding. Require the plan to exist as a board-visible milestone, and fund the inventory and planning work rather than letting it compete with day-to-day ICT.
• Procurement discipline as policy. Direct that no major system or medical-device purchase proceeds without a post-quantum roadmap from the vendor. The board sets the rule; the executive enforces it on every contract.
• Progress against milestones, not reassurance. Ask for the inventory's coverage and the priority order, not a one-line "it's in hand." Plan by end of 2026, critical systems underway by end of 2028, complete by end of 2030.

What should wait

Just as important is knowing where not to spend. Moving too early can cost more than moving on time, and the "quantum-safe" pitches in your inbox are selling tomorrow's product at today's premium.

• Do not rip and replace ahead of the standards. ASD is explicit: do not rush ahead of standardised and verified implementations. The replacement maths is now set, finalised by the United States' standards body, NIST, in 2024 (the new algorithms carry names like ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA). It should arrive through tested vendor updates built on reputable code, not a panicked in-house rewrite. Inventing your own encryption trades a future problem for an immediate one.
• Yes, Australia is adopting these standards, but on its own terms. ASD has written the same NIST-standardised algorithms into its Information Security Manual as ASD-approved (controls ISM-1990 to ISM-1995 add ML-KEM and ML-DSA), so you follow the ISM, not NIST directly. ASD sets its own parameters and is stricter in places: by 2030 the ISM requires the stronger settings ML-KEM-1024 and ML-DSA-87. The reassuring part is that the algorithms your vendors are building toward are the ones ASD will accept, so this is not a bet on which standard wins.
• Do not buy quantum key distribution. You will hear quantum key distribution, or QKD, sold as the quantum answer. It is not. QKD uses the physics of light rather than maths to share a key between two points, but it needs specialised hardware and dedicated fibre, so it does not scale to a health network; it only shares a key without proving who is on the other end, so it still needs conventional cryptography to authenticate; and it does nothing for your real exposure, data already harvested. ASD does not support it, and US and UK agencies agree. Post-quantum cryptography is the practical fix.
• Do not be rushed by "quantum-safe" marketing. If a product cannot tell you which ASD-approved algorithms it uses, and how easily it could swap them again later (often sold as crypto-agility, the ability to change encryption methods without re-engineering the system), it is selling fear, not readiness.

The work that pays off in 2026 is knowing what you have and controlling what you buy. The cryptography swap comes later, through your vendors.

The board's one-page test

Six YES or NO questions for the board's next meeting. These are governance questions: they ask whether the work is owned, funded and on track, not how it is done.

The executive team's one-page test

The companion checklist for the people delivering the work. These are delivery questions: they ask whether the early phases are actually moving.

The quantum threat sounds like a problem for physicists. The readiness for it is ordinary discipline split across two levels: the board governs and funds the plan, the executive team builds the inventory and controls what gets bought. The patients whose records you hold are trusting you to keep them private for the rest of their lives. The clock on that promise has already started.