The Quantum Threat Is Already a Business Decision You're Making Today | An On Location Conversation at Infosecurity Europe 2026 with Rik Ferguson, Vice President of Security Intelligence

⬥EPISODE NOTES⬥

At Infosecurity Europe 2026, Sean Martin sits down with Rik Ferguson, Vice President of Security Intelligence at Forescout, a day before Rik Ferguson takes the keynote stage with a deliberately provocative title: "Post-Quantum Cryptography Is a Way Off. We Can Wait, Can't We?" The honest answer, he says, is that waiting is a choice, and it is the wrong one.

The threat is neither theoretical nor distant. Rik Ferguson walks through why the infrastructure for harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks already exists, pointing to Salt Typhoon, to BGP rerouting by unfriendly nations, and to intelligence agencies stockpiling encrypted data they cannot read yet but expect to read later. With NIST placing Q Day around 2035, Google pointing at 2029, and IBM's fault-tolerant Starling system slated for 2029, the distance between "someday" and "the hardware you purchase this year" has effectively closed.

Sean Martin keeps steering the conversation back to the business. The parallel both of them keep returning to is Y2K, which became a non-event precisely because people did the work. The quantum question, Rik Ferguson argues, is not only about security or resilience, it is a budget and procurement question: which data has a long enough shelf life to still matter when it is finally decrypted? Pharmaceutical R&D, merger and acquisition strategy, sovereign debt positions, and legal negotiations all live under an assumed umbrella of privacy that encryption may not hold.

The most unsettling point is what a harvest-now attack does to incident response. There is no time-bounding. Adversaries could have been collecting for a decade, and the first sign of trouble arrives only when the data is weaponized or made public, leaving the investigation disabled by chronology alone.

Rik Ferguson closes with a message that reaches past cryptography itself: as attacks move toward autonomy, defense has to as well, which is why he wants the industry to move past Assume Breach and into Assume Autonomy.

⬥HOST⬥

Sean Martin, CISSP -- Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Host, Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast & Music Evolves Podcast | https://www.seanmartin.com/

⬥GUEST⬥

Rik Ferguson, Vice President of Security Intelligence, Forescout | https://www.linkedin.com/in/rikferguson/

⬥RESOURCES⬥

Infosecurity Europe 2026 is taking place June 2-4, 2026 | ExCeL London -- Follow our coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/infosecurity-europe-2026-infosec-london-cybersecurity-event-coverage

The Future of Cybersecurity Newsletter | https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7108625890296614912/

Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast | https://www.seanmartin.com/redefining-cybersecurity-podcast

On Location | https://www.itspmagazine.com/on-location

⬥KEYWORDS⬥

sean martin, rik ferguson, infosecurity europe, post-quantum cryptography, pqc, harvest now decrypt later, hndl, q day, quantum computing, encryption, salt typhoon, quantum agility, crypto agility, post-quantum migration, procurement, on location, itspmagazine

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.