The Role of Technology Vendors in Your Quantum-Safe Migration
Who is responsible for migrating your systems to quantum-safe algorithms? Is it your vendors or your cybersecurity team?
The customers I speak to are not always clear on this question. But from my perspective, the answer is your cybersecurity team. They have the ultimate responsibility of ensuring your organization is secure in a post-quantum future. However, they will need a lot of help from your technology vendors.
This article outlines what you should expect (or demand) from your vendors, and what remains the responsibility of your cyber team.
What To Expect From General Vendors
A general vendor does not offer specific cryptographic services to you. Instead, they provide a business service that uses cryptography to maintain security and resilience.
Consider the accounting platform SAP. It is no doubt riddled with cryptography, yet its purpose is to manage your finances. Therefore, SAP’s focus will be on migrating their underlying cryptography to post-quantum technologies, while maintaining your business services without interruption.
You should expect a general vendor to share a quantum-safe migration roadmap with you, complete with timelines. They should explain the activities they will complete to address the quantum threat, and how they will impact you as a user.
Although your vendor will not begin migration until the NIST post-quantum algorithms are standardised next year, you should expect them to already have a roadmap in place. If they don’t, this is a cause for concern.
Some vendors may already offer a test version of their product, which uses post-quantum algorithms. This allows your cyber team to experiment with the impact on performance or interoperability.
What To Expect From Cryptographic Vendors
A cryptographic vendor provides you with services directly related to cryptography, such as network security, data encryption or key management.
The expectations that apply to general vendors also apply to cryptographic vendors. However, you will need more information from your cryptographic vendors to pull off a smooth migration.
Cryptographic vendors must provide you with detailed guidance on how to migrate between their current product suite and the new versions that use post-quantum algorithms. For instance, you might need to understand how to re-process legacy data so that it’s protected by the new algorithms. Similarly, network security vendors will need to provide detailed instructions on migrating traffic flows while maintaining uptime.
I would expect cryptographic vendors to be far more hands-on during your migration. Expect to have discussions of your deployment architecture with their account management teams, and don’t be afraid to ask the hard technical questions.
What Information You Should be Ready to Share
The flow of information will not be one-way. You should be prepared to share information with your vendors to help them help you.
Having your migration plan developed, at least at a high level, will be critical for meaningful conversations with your vendors. This will allow you to contrast their timelines for migration versus your expectations.
Vendors will also benefit from understanding how you use their products in conjunction with products from other vendors. The goal here is to spot edge cases, where you risk business downtime because the vendor wasn’t anticipating how you were using their product.
Finally, make sure you know the configuration of your deployment. The devil is in the details when it comes to planning migration, so be prepared to tell your vendor which features you are using and how you’ve configured product security settings.
What is Out of Scope for Your Vendor?
While your vendors should provide a lot of help and guidance, they are not responsible for everything.
Your cybersecurity team will be responsible for planning your overall migration strategy, including prioritising which systems to migrate first. This will involve understanding the relative importance of business systems, and the requirements for data security.
While vendors should provide some guidance for interoperability, ultimately the IT and cybersecurity teams are responsible for ensuring updates to one service do not impact another service.
Finally, you must ensure your IT and cyber teams are leading the conversation with your end users. You cannot rely on vendors to manage the communication with your customers and internal stakeholders.
What Should You Expect to See Today?
A good vendor will already be talking to you about their plans for quantum-safe migration.
For mass-market products, this might be via blog posts and thought-leadership articles. For products with a deeper client/vendor relationship, the topic of quantum-safe migration should already be appearing in quarterly business reviews.
For cryptographic vendors, you should also be expecting test versions to be available today, to allow for experimentation.
Overall, if any vendor is not able to talk about their plans for quantum-safe migration today, even at a high level, then you should flag this as a cause for concern.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum company, pioneers powerful quantum computers and advanced software solutions. Quantinuum’s technology drives breakthroughs in materials discovery, cybersecurity, and next-gen quantum AI. With over 500 employees, including 370+ scientists and engineers, Quantinuum leads the quantum computing revolution across continents.
Quantinuum is focusing on redefining what’s possible in hybrid quantum–classical computing by integrating Quantinuum’s best-in-class systems with high-performance NVIDIA accelerated computing to create powerful new architectures that can solve the world’s most pressing challenges.
The launch of Helios, Powered by Honeywell, the world’s most accurate quantum computer, marks a major milestone in quantum computing. Helios is now available to all customers through the cloud or on-premise deployment, launched with a go-to-market offering that seamlessly pairs Helios with the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform, targeting specific end markets such as drug discovery, finance, materials science, and advanced AI research.
We are also working with NVIDIA to adopt NVIDIA NVQLink, an open system architecture, as a standard for advancing hybrid quantum-classical supercomputing. Using this technology with Quantinuum Guppy and the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform, Quantinuum has implemented NVIDIA accelerated computing across Helios and future systems to perform real-time decoding for quantum error correction.
In an industry-first demonstration, an NVIDIA GPU-based decoder integrated in the Helios control engine improved the logical fidelity of quantum operations by more than 3% — a notable gain given Helios’ already exceptionally low error rate. These results demonstrate how integration with NVIDIA accelerated computing through NVQLink can directly enhance the accuracy and scalability of quantum computation.
This unique collaboration spans the full Quantinuum technology stack. Quantinuum’s next-generation software development environment allows users to interleave quantum and GPU-accelerated classical computations in a single workflow. Developers can build hybrid applications using tools such as NVIDIA CUDA-Q, NVIDIA CUDA-QX, and Quantinuum’s Guppy, to make advanced quantum programming accessible to a broad community of innovators.
The collaboration also reaches into applied research through the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Computing Research Center (NVAQC), where an NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 supercomputer can be paired with Quantinuum’s Helios to further drive hybrid quantum-GPU research, including the development of breakthrough quantum-enhanced AI applications.
A recent achievement illustrates this potential: The ADAPT-GQE framework, a transformer-based Generative Quantum AI (GenQAI) approach, uses a Generative AI model to efficiently synthesize circuits to prepare the ground state of a chemical system on a quantum computer. Developed by Quantinuum, NVIDIA, and a pharmaceutical industry leader—and leveraging NVIDIA CUDA-Q with GPU-accelerated methods—ADAPT-GQE achieved a 234x speed-up in generating training data for complex molecules. The team used the framework to explore imipramine, a molecule crucial to pharmaceutical development. The transformer was trained on imipramine conformers to synthesize ground state circuits at orders of magnitude faster than ADAPT-VQE, and the circuit produced by the transformer was run on Helios to prepare the ground state using InQuanto, Quantinuum's computational chemistry platform.
From collaborating on hardware and software integrations to GenQAI applications, the collaboration between Quantinuum and NVIDIA is building the bridge between classical and quantum computing and creating a future where AI becomes more expansive through quantum computing, and quantum computing becomes more powerful through AI.
By Dr. Noah Berthusen
The earliest works on quantum error correction showed that by combining many noisy physical qubits into a complex entangled state called a "logical qubit," this state could survive for arbitrarily long times. QEC researchers devote much effort to hunt for codes that function well as "quantum memories," as they are called. Many promising code families have been found, but this is only half of the story.
Being able to keep a qubit around for a long time is one thing, but to realize the theoretical advantages of quantum computing we need to run quantum circuits. And to make sure noise doesn't ruin our computation, these circuits need to be run on the logical qubits of our code. This is often much more challenging than performing gates on the physical qubits of our device, as these "logical gates" often require many physical operations in their implementation. What's more, it often is not immediately obvious which logical gates a code has, and so converting a physical circuit into a logical circuit can be rather difficult.
Some codes, like the famous surface code, are good quantum memories and also have easy logical gates. The drawback is that the ratio of physical qubits to logical qubits (the "encoding rate") is low, and so many physical qubits are required to implement large logical algorithms. High-rate codes that are good quantum memories have also been found, but computing on them is much more difficult. The holy grail of QEC, so to speak, would be a high-rate code that is a good quantum memory and also has easy logical gates. Here, we make progress on that front by developing a new code with those properties.
Building on prior error correcting codes
A recent work from Quantinuum QEC researchers introduced genon codes. The underlying construction method for these codes, called the "symplectic double cover," also provided a way to obtain logical gates that are well suited for Quantinuum's QCCD architecture. Namely, these "SWAP-transversal" gates are performed by applying single qubit operations and relabeling the physical qubits of the device. Thanks to the all-to-all connectivity facilitated through qubit movement on the QCCD architecture, this relabeling can be done in software essentially for free. Combined with extremely high fidelity (~1.2 x10-5) single-qubit operations, the resulting logical gates are similarly high fidelity.
Given the promise of these codes, we take them a step further in our new paper. We combine the symplectic double codes with the [[4,2,2]] Iceberg code using a procedure called "code concatenation". A concatenated code is a bit like nesting dolls, with an outer code containing codes within it---with these too potentially containing codes. More technically, in a concatenated code the logical qubits of one code act as the physical qubits of another code.
The new codes, which we call "concatenated symplectic double codes", were designed in such a way that they have many of these easily-implementable SWAP-transversal gates. Central to its construction, we show how the concatenation method allows us to "upgrade" logical gates in terms of their ease of implementation; this procedure may provide insights for constructing other codes with convenient logical gates. Notably, the SWAP-transversal gate set on this code is so powerful that only two additional operations (logical T and S) are necessary for universal computation. Furthermore, these codes have many logical qubits, and we also present numerical evidence to suggest that they are good quantum memories.
Concatenated symplectic double codes have one of the easiest logical computation schemes, and we didn’t have to sacrifice rate to achieve it. Looking forward in our roadmap, we are targeting hundreds of logical qubits at ~ 1x 10-8 logical error rate by 2029. These codes put us in a prime position to leverage the best characteristics of our hardware and create a device that can achieve real commercial advantage.
Every year, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC) brings together the global supercomputing community to explore the technologies driving the future of computing.
Join Quantinuum at this year’s conference, taking place November 16th – 21st in St. Louis, Missouri, where we will showcase how our quantum hardware, software, and partnerships are helping define the next era of high-performance and quantum computing.
Visit Quantinuum in the Expo Hall
The Quantinuum team will be on-site at booth #4432 to showcase how we’re building the bridge between HPC and quantum.
- Live demo unit of our quantum hardware
- Our new Helios replica, providing an up-close look at the design behind our next-generation system
- The Helios chip, highlighting the innovation driving the world’s most advanced trapped-ion quantum computers
On Tuesday and Wednesday, our quantum computing experts will host daily tutorials at our booth on Helios, our next-generation hardware platform, Nexus, our all-in-one quantum computing platform, and Hybrid Workflows, featuring the integration of NVIDIA CUDA-Q with Quantinuum Systems.
Speaking Sessions at SC25
Join our team as they share insights on the opportunities and challenges of quantum integration within the HPC ecosystem:
Panel Session: The Quantum Era of HPC: Roadmaps, Challenges and Opportunities in Navigating the Integration Frontier
November 19th | 10:30 – 12:00pm CST
During this panel session, Kentaro Yamamoto from Quantinuum, will join experts from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, IBM, QuEra, RIKEN, and Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre to explore how quantum and classical systems are being brought together to accelerate scientific discovery and industrial innovation.
BoF Session: Bridging the Gap: Making Quantum-Classical Hybridization Work in HPC
November 19th | 5:15 – 6:45pm CST
Quantum-classical hybrid computing is moving from theory to reality, yet no clear roadmap exists for how best to integrate quantum processing units (QPUs) into established HPC environments. In this Birds of a Feather discussion, co-led by Quantinuum’s Grahame Vittorini and representatives from BCS, DOE, EPCC, Inria, ORNL NVIDIA, and RIKEN we hope to bring together a global community of HPC practitioners, system architects, quantum computing specialists and workflow researchers, including participants in the Workflow Community Initiative, to assess the state of hybrid integration and identify practical steps toward scalable, impactful deployment.