Co-Author: Rezarta Puka - Enterprise Partner & Alliance EMEA at Sectigo
For twenty-five years, the certificate underpinning your organisation's secure connections has done its job invisibly. RSA and ECC have authenticated websites, signed code, and encrypted email without most people ever thinking about the cryptography running underneath. That era is ending on a government-mandated clock.
In August 2024, NIST finalized the first post-quantum cryptography standards, establishing ML-KEM for key establishment and ML-DSA, FN-DSA, and SLH-DSA for digital signatures. These are not experimental technologies; they are the quantum-resistant successors to the RSA and ECC algorithms that underpin today's TLS certificates, code signing, and email encryption.
The timeline has also accelerated. In June 2026, the White House issued Executive Order 14409, moving the U.S. federal government's post-quantum migration deadline from 2035 to 2031. Agencies must transition high-value systems to post-quantum key establishment by 2030 and digital signatures by 2031. For the private sector, the message is clear: organisations connected to government supply chains or regulated industries will face pressure to start planning much sooner than expected.
For South African organisations, this is not just a U.S. issue. Customers, partners, and regulators increasingly expect alignment with global security standards, while banking, telecommunications, and financial services firms operate within interconnected international networks. Just as importantly, "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks ignore geography. Data intercepted in Johannesburg today is just as vulnerable to future quantum decryption as data captured anywhere else in the world, making post-quantum readiness a business resilience priority today. The threat is already happening
The most urgent driver of this migration isn't a quantum computer that exists today. It's "harvest now, decrypt later": the practice of capturing and storing encrypted traffic now, in anticipation of decrypting it once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer becomes available. This is a documented, active threat.
Data encrypted under RSA-2048 or ECC-256 this year, if intercepted and stored, has a shelf life that outlasts the cryptography protecting it. Health records, financial data, government communications and any information with a sensitivity horizon measured in decades are exposed the moment they're transmitted under classical algorithms, well before a quantum computer capable of breaking them exists.
Executive Order 14409 explicitly sequences key establishment ahead of digital signatures for this reason: a session key protected by today's cryptography protects data that may need to stay secret for ten, twenty, or thirty years, so that's the more urgent problem to solve first. A forged signature[LC4] [GM5] , by contrast, is a real-time attack. You can't retroactively forge a software update that already shipped.
The urgency is already visible in the local threat landscape. According to ransomware monitoring data, South Africa experiences approximately 17,849 ransomware detections annually [Source: Interpol], with attackers increasingly operating on compressed timelines that leave organisations little opportunity to identify and remediate weaknesses before exploitation. As cybercriminals accelerate their operations and digital trust infrastructure grows more complex, organisations cannot afford manual approaches to managing certificates and cryptographic assets.
The scale problem nobody is talking about
Here's what makes this migration harder than past cryptographic transitions: post-quantum algorithms produce much larger keys and signatures. Deployed naively through today's public key infrastructure, they would bloat every TLS handshake, driving up bandwidth and processing costs across the internet, a burden mobile users and high-latency networks would feel most acutely, and one that could break legacy web servers and load balancers outright.
This is why the emerging concept of Merkle Tree Certificates matters. Rather than forcing oversized post-quantum signatures into infrastructure that was never built to carry them, MTCs rethink how certificates are constructed and delivered. A certificate authority batches the certificates it issues from a Merkle Tree structure and signs summaries in the tree itself, rather than every certificate individually; browsers receive the trusted tree heads in advance through transparency infrastructure. When a browser connects to a site, it receives a compact proof -- a handful of hashes -- showing the certificate belongs to a tree it already trusts, instead of a full chain of heavyweight signatures.
A single ML-DSA signature alone runs roughly 2.4 kilobytes; a Merkle inclusion proof typically comes in under a kilobyte. Cryptographers at Google and Cloudflare, with contributions from Sectigo, have been developing this approach specifically to keep the post-quantum internet fast without sacrificing security, and as a side effect, it makes Certificate Transparency logging inseparable from issuance itself, closing a blind spot in how certificates are monitored today. [LC12] [GM13]
Merkle Tree Certificates are expected to be available from certificate authorities starting in 2027.
Crypto-agility is the engineering principle that makes this survivable
None of this is optional, and none of it is simple. Migrating an enterprise certificate estate means identifying every certificate and cryptographic asset running vulnerable algorithms across cloud, on-premises, and partner ecosystems, replacing each with a post-quantum equivalent, and confirming that every system in the trust chain can actually support the new algorithms. Doing that manually, across an estate that may run into the tens of thousands of certificates, isn't realistic. Certificate lifecycle management automation is the prerequisite, not a nice-to-have.
This is the scale problem Altron Security manages daily, banking, telecoms and financial services clients with certificate estates spanning legacy infrastructure, cloud and third-party integrations built up over years. A post-quantum migration at that scale can't run on spreadsheets. It's exactly why our CLM practice, backed by Sectigo, is built around automation first.
That's the same discipline organisations need for crypto-agility more broadly: building PKI infrastructure that can absorb an algorithm change without forcing a rebuild of every dependent system. The CA/Browser Forum and major root certificate authority programmes are already publishing PQC roadmaps. Organizations that wait for the industry to move first, rather than building their own inventory and migration plan now, will find themselves executing a reactive replacement exercise under deadline pressure that will stress-test both their certificate management tooling and their business continuity.
Where to start
A practical PQC migration roadmap runs in four phases:
Discover every RSA and ECC certificate and cryptographic asset in the estate through automated inventory.
Assess and risk-prioritise by the sensitivity and longevity of the data each certificate protects.
Plan algorithm selection and sequencing, starting with key establishment where harvest-now-decrypt-later risk is most concentrated
Migrate through CLM-driven automation rather than manual replacement.
Spread across 24 to 60 months, that roadmap is manageable. Compressed into a crisis window because the audit didn't start early enough, it isn't.
Conclusion
Post-quantum migration is a programme, not a project, and it requires certificate lifecycle management automation as its foundation. Altron Security helps organisations assess their cryptographic exposure, select the right PQC algorithms, and build the automated CLM capability that will make the migration manageable rather than a crisis. That capability is backed by Sectigo's strategic channel partnership with Altron Security, giving customers direct access to Sectigo Certificate Manager and a structured path onto modern, quantum-ready CLM infrastructure.
As a leading certificate authority and Altron Security Partner, Sectigo sits at the intersection of where these standards are set and where enterprises actually have to implement them. We're tracking the full post-quantum landscape, from NIST-standardised algorithms to evolving IETF specifications and browser roadmap decisions on approaches like Merkle Tree Certificates, and helping organisations build the cryptographic inventory, algorithm strategy, and automated certificate lifecycle management capability that turns this migration from a looming deadline into a managed programme.
The math didn't change overnight, and neither did the standards. What changed is the runway. Organisations that treat post-quantum migration as a 2031 problem will spend 2030 finding out how many systems they forgot they had.
Why Partner with Altron Security?
Post-quantum cryptography is more than a technology upgrade. It is a business-critical transformation that requires visibility, planning, and automation.
Altron Security helps organisations understand their cryptographic exposure, discover and manage digital certificates across complex environments, and build the Certificate Lifecycle Management capabilities needed for a successful quantum-readiness strategy.
Through its strategic partnership with Sectigo, Altron Security provides access to industry-leading certificate management solutions, helping organisations reduce operational risk, maintain compliance, strengthen digital trust, and prepare confidently for the transition to a quantum-safe future.