Dave Krauthamer is the field CTO and a board member at QuSecure.

For more than two decades, large corporations have woven cryptographic functions directly into the fabric of their applications, believing that vendor-supplied encryption would safeguard data indefinitely. In practice, this approach has created a hidden liability, known as cryptographic debt, whose interest is now compounding as breakthroughs in quantum computing and artificial intelligence threaten to render existing protections obsolete. Senior executives must recognize that the long-neglected fragility of embedded encryption, combined with the rapid pace of algorithmic advancements, poses a systemic risk to enterprise security and continuity.