Streamlining post quantum cryptography migrations with AWS and IBM Consulting
As quantum computing advances, AWS and IBM Consulting® collaborate to help organizations strengthen the resilience of their most critical applications and data.
As quantum computing advances, AWS and IBM Consulting® collaborate to help organizations strengthen the resilience of their most critical applications and data. This collaboration is not only about modernizing encryption. It is also about ensuring the continuity of digital trust, operational reliability and regulatory compliance in an era where quantum capabilities could render today’s cryptography obsolete.
Across industries—from energy and finance to government and defense—enterprises increasingly depend on AWS for mission-critical workloads. The ability to anticipate and manage cryptographic risk—rather than react to it—defines the next generation of digital resilience.
Quantum computers represent a fundamental transformation in computation. Using qubits that can exist in multiple states simultaneously, they solve certain mathematical problems exponentially faster than classical machines. This development poses a distinctive challenge to asymmetric cryptography—the cornerstone of digital trust—used in protocols such as TLS, in software updates and in digital signatures.
The vulnerability is systemic. Sufficiently powerful quantum computers could eventually break the same cryptographic methods that secure online transactions, identity systems and API communications. This “harvest now, decrypt later” risk means data encrypted today could be revealed in the future, even if a breach doesn’t occur for years.
For organizations running critical systems on AWS—financial transaction engines, healthcare platforms or industrial automation—the implication is clear: cryptography modernization is not a technical upgrade; it’s a strategic necessity for operational continuity and long-term resilience.
AWS takes a proactive, multi-layered approach to migrating to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). This transition occurs in phases, beginning with systems communicating over untrusted networks, such as the internet. The first phase involves a comprehensive inventory of existing systems and the development of new standards, with rigorous testing to ensure smooth migration.
Following the initial assessment, AWS is focusing on integrating PQC algorithms on public AWS endpoints to protect customer data transmitted to AWS. This initiative includes implementing ML-KEM within AWS-LC, the open source FIPS-140-3-validated cryptographic library used throughout AWS services.
For long-term security needs, AWS is adopting ML-DSA, a new digital signature algorithm resistant to quantum attacks. This capability is offered through AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), enabling customers to generate and use PQC keys for signing operations. The final phase focuses on integrating PQC signing algorithms into services for session-based authentication, such as server and client certificate validation.
Throughout this process, AWS is actively collaborating with industry initiatives like the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence and the Linux Foundation’s Post Quantum Cryptography Alliance. These collaborations aim to ensure interoperability across different PQC implementations.
You can find more detailed information on AWS’ Post Quantum Cryptography migration plan on the AWS security blog.
For most organizations, the transition to post-quantum cryptography extends far beyond updating algorithms. It requires a coordinated effort that spans governance, risk, architecture and operations. Understanding where cryptography underpins business processes—customer authentication, supply chain communications, cloud connectivity or regulatory data retention—is essential for managing quantum risk effectively.
A sound quantum-safe transformation starts with assessing existing cryptographic use and classifying data and systems based on sensitivity and longevity. The findings should then inform a prioritized backlog, balancing technical feasibility with business criticality. Many organizations adopt a hybrid approach during migration, running classical and post-quantum algorithms in parallel to ensure continuity and compatibility.
Operationally, enterprises must enhance their ability to update software, distribute new libraries and manage configurations at scale. Implementing TLS 1.3 across environments and maintaining agility in AWS CLI and SDK adoption are practical first steps. Continuous monitoring remains essential over time, as PQC algorithms can behave differently in performance, latency and resource use.
This business-aligned, phased approach transforms quantum-safe migration from an isolated exercise into an enduring capability—one that strengthens cyber resilience, regulatory posture and stakeholder confidence.
IBM Consulting Autonomous Security for Cloud (ASC) extends AWS’s innovation with intelligent, policy-driven automation—ensuring that quantum-safe practices are natively embedded across enterprise cloud operations. Built on AWS Bedrock and underpinned by AI-based policy inference, ASC continuously interprets enterprise cryptographic policies and validates them against live AWS configurations. This approach ensures that every deployment aligns with emerging Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standards and evolving regulatory expectations.
In its current design, ASC uses Global Inferencing Database (GID) and AWS Config signals to validate compliance with enterprise controls. As PQC algorithms like ML-KEM (Module-Lattice Key Encapsulation Mechanism) become mainstream across AWS services, ASC’s inference models and GID schema evolve to natively understand PQC metadata attributes. This evolution enables ASC to autonomously derive, enforce and remediate cryptographic controls at scale—translating PQC readiness into actionable AWS Config rules without human intervention.
ML-KEM adoption spans multiple AWS resources—from AWS KMS, AWS Transfer Family and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) to Amazon EKS, SNS and other services that handle encryption, key exchange or secure transport. ASC’s GID-driven inference layer is enhanced to detect and interpret PQC-specific attributes within these services—such as ML-KEM key policies, PQC-compliant certificate chains and hybrid cryptographic states. This enhancement allows policy-driven validation of PQC readiness.
This capability forms the foundation of ASCPQC, ASC’s quantum-safe evolution. Through AI-enabled reasoning, ASC not only identifies cryptographic drift but also simulates and recommends PQC-compliant remediation paths, ensuring smooth migration from classical cryptography to ML-KEM-based implementations.
During the hybrid transition period—when classical and PQC algorithms must coexist—ASC continuously monitors configurations, detects legacy encryption primitives, applying or suggesting quantum-resilient alternatives. This closed-loop, self-healing security model eliminates manual effort while maintaining enterprise-grade assurance and agility.
Beyond compliance automation, ASC provides real-time visibility into cryptographic posture through dynamic dashboards that measure PQC adoption, migration progress and residual risk across AWS workloads.
As part of its autonomous enforcement model, ASC leverages AWS Config to continuously detect drift in PQC configurations across AWS services. By correlating ML-KEM and ML-DSA compatibility attributes from AWS KMS, Transfer Family, ACM and other cryptographic endpoints, ASC identifies when deployed configurations deviate from approved quantum-safe baselines. This approach ensures that services not yet aligned with PQC standards are flagged for remediation, allowing organizations to maintain a consistent quantum-safe posture across their cloud estate.
This unified visibility transforms quantum-safe migration into a strategic program of resilience and modernization, positioning ASC as the autonomous control plane for secure operations in the post-quantum era.
Together, AWS and IBM Consulting are defining the future of quantum-safe cloud security. ASC’s ability to interpret, translate and autonomously act on PQC intelligence lays the foundation for a new era of adaptive, AI-driven cybersecurity resilience.
The arrival of quantum computing capable of breaking today’s encryption can still be years away—but the time to prepare is now. The organizations that start early are those organizations that maintain operational trust, regulatory readiness and customer confidence in the quantum era.
AWS and IBM are committed to supporting customers through this transition. Whether you need guidance on assessing your current systems, help developing a migration strategy or support in implementing quantum-resistant algorithms in a controlled and measurable way, our teams are ready to assist.
We encourage you to start planning your quantum-safe strategy now. Contact your AWS and IBM Consulting representatives to begin this crucial journey toward ensuring your data remains secure in the quantum era. By acting now, organizations ensure that their most valuable data, services and applications remain protected—not just for the next technology cycle, but also for the next generation.