Long regarded with great theoretical interest and a topic of decades of academic research, quantum science is now approaching an inflection point. Advances in quantum technology are bringing commercial applications closer to reality, with the potential to accelerate computing, enhance industrial sensor accuracy and boost telecommunications
reliability. These developments could have far-reaching implications for sectors including healthcare, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence—and the office technology industry.
Recognizing quantum technology’s promise, the U.S. Department of Commerce recently announced $2 billion in federal incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act that will go to nine companies in the quantum space: $1 billion for IBM; $375 million for GlobalFoundries to catalyze manufacturing capacity; and between $38 million and $100 million for seven other firms to overcome the most potentially impactful and unresolved engineering needs.
In the office technology space, as previously covered in The Cannata Report, HP last year became the first company to release printers with the capability of protecting their data against attacks from quantum computers. This could be crucial given that experts believe there’s a roughly one in three chance that by 2034, these computers will be able to decode asymmetric cryptography algorithms potentially within hours—rather than
years—making these machines vulnerable to hackers on a whole new level.
This has led to demands for “quantum-resistant printing” that encrypts data in a way that future-proofs it, rather than leaving it vulnerable to bad actors who are, even today, harvesting data from institutions like hospitals, banks, and law firms that they might not be able to decrypt now—but anticipate having that ability within a decade. Companies that turn a blind eye to this will expose themselves to liability and lose out on RFPs from government, banking, and other sectors; while those that open their eyes could also have new business opportunities.
Hackers already know about quantum
“What’s going to happen with quantum computing is that the current encryption is going to be broken in split seconds because of the speed of quantum,” said Kevin Neal, president and CEO of P3iD Technologies, a software and solutions company that recently joined The Consortium, a think tank of imaging industry leaders. “People will harden their servers and their computer laptops and do Windows updates. What’s the most vulnerable device on your network? Printers and scanners—the stepchildren that never get attention,” in terms of patches and updating firmware.
Office technology dealers that don’t take this issue seriously are doing a great disservice to their customers, Neal noted. “Everybody will say, ‘I shoulda, I shoulda, I shoulda,’” he said. “A manufacturer
like HP is getting ahead of this because it will happen.”
While some have estimated that quantum will reach the mass market in 10 to 15 years, Google recently estimated it will be more like 2029, Neal said, noting that companies buy printers and scanners to last 10 years. “If you’re buying a machine now that doesn’t have the proper encryption, you could be in big, big trouble,” he added. “The old encryption is not sufficient. If [hackers] get access to a network, [they] will be able to decrypt passwords and get onto networks through scanners and printers.”
Neal compares quantum-resistant office technology to placing a firewall on your computer network before connecting to the internet. “When [dealers] start making recommendations to their customers, they should start looking for devices that have this quantum resilience,” he said. “Our industry needs to start demanding this. That’s all they have to ask—a dealer that cares about their customers—‘Do you have a quantum-resilient device’ … Computers and servers, and printers, you use them for a decade. You’re not going to replace them all. Start making smart decisions now.”
Even if your whole network is secured, if one printer or scanner isn’t updated, that’s going to be the source of a data breach, Neal warned. “It’s going to happen quick,” he said. “The hackers are harvesting data
right now. They’re not exploiting it,” he said, adding, “They can’t quite decrypt the files, yet. Once they have quantum computers, they will be able to decrypt it. You’ll see this flurry of data breaches happening in a couple of years.”
Sitting on a gold mine
While quantum presents undeniable dangers to the office technology industry, there are also opportunities to be had, said Sean Brehm, principal at Spectral Capital, which focuses on both quantum computing and artificial intelligence. He’s also skeptical that the security vulnerabilities will cause the sky to fall. “They’re already doing the store-now, hack-later,” he said. “Cyber-experts are saying, ‘That’s Chicken Little.’ It’s not Chicken
Little.” But it is a concern worth addressing, he added.
On the positive side, as large but disconnected datasets that have been stored for years in printers and scanners become easier to extract and analyze, office technologycompanies will have major data analytics prospects, Brehm said. “They’re sitting on a gold mine,” he explained. “The people who have been saving and storing these print documents … they probably think they’re in a dying industry, but they’re not. It’s probably one of the biggest opportunities in the quantum era. It’s one of those industries that people have already passed off as failing, and the cost of labor is going to kill them, all those kinds of things.”
But quantum will enable companies to do “deep discovery of data you already own,” Brehm said. “That can be transformed into—not the old-fashioned data lakes of the past, where you had to extract it, transform, and run sequential analytics—but [analysis] now … becomes Bert-and-Ernie simple,” he said. “You’re going to see throughput and velocity at levels you’ve never seen before. When you think about these companies that have tons and tons of legacy data that’s maybe unstructured, you can run analytics on it, and you’re going to see those companies in a unique position to get ahead of the curve.”
Quantum-related tomography will find patterns and correlations, and “not only will CEOs have deeper insight into their own companies, but vendors will have deeper insight into their customers,” Brehm said. “It will go from a labor-constrained industry to a knowledge-based industry. When you coalesce that data, you’re going to have amazing insights about your industry, and your business. The print industry is one of those industries that is going to adopt it faster.”
Brehm said he has been talking with companies, and he wryly compares the reactions he gets to a dog cocking its head as if thinking, “There’s something interesting here.” He added, “They understand the value proposition. They perceive themselves as on the decline. This could be a renaissance for them, to take all that data from documents that they’ve been storing for 15 or 20 years now.”
The quantum environment will “raise the boats” of anyone that gets involved in it — and leave others behind, Brehm predicted. “Early adopters will move at such a velocity, at such scale, that there will be no opportunity to catch back up,” he said. “If you’re not thinking about post-quantum security right now, you’re already too late. Then, if you’re not thinking about how you can leverage the dataset you have for the quantum environment, you should be. It’s going to redefine analytics.”
