Harvest Now, Decrypt Later: The Quiet Race to Quantum-Proof AI Infrastructure
It is curious, in these days of swift innovation, to see the guardians of data not waiting for the storm to break, but quietly reinforcing the foundations—as one might renew the locks on a house before the winter frost has even touched the eaves.
It began not with a breach, but with a whisper: the realization that today’s unbreakable code could be tomorrow’s open book. In the mid-2020s, as quantum processors crossed critical qubit thresholds, a quiet transformation took hold—not in secret labs, but in the boardrooms of infrastructure giants like F5 and NetApp. They understood that the real threat wasn’t the quantum computer itself, but the years of encrypted data already sitting exposed in storage arrays, waiting for decryption like seeds planted for a future harvest. This echoes a moment in 1977, when Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman introduced RSA encryption, only to immediately spark debates about its eventual fragility in the face of algorithmic or computational leaps. Now, history repeats with a twist: instead of waiting for collapse, the guardians of data are rebuilding the walls *before* the siege. The F5-NetApp alliance is not merely a product update—it’s a signal that the era of *anticipatory security* has arrived, where the most valuable skill is not reacting to attacks, but imagining futures in which today’s secrets are no longer safe.
—Ada H. Pemberley
Dispatch from The Prepared E0
Published February 12, 2026
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