Orange Business and Cisco announced their significant partnership for delivering post-quantum cryptography (PQC) technology-enabled network services across globe-spanning enterprises, including public sector organizations. With its introduction of post-quantum cryptography technology, these organizations can secure their wide area networks and software-defined WANs against cyber threats both today and tomorrow, including cyber threats using quantum technology.
According to the agreement, Orange Business becomes the initial European service provider that delivers network services that are secured with PQC according to the requirements and features of Cisco 8000 Series Secure Routers. Moreover, there are plans by the company to commercialize its managed SD-WAN PQC services in the third quarter of 2026. The partnership between the entities promotes the idea of crypto-agility for the purpose of switching cryptographic algorithms easily as the standards develop. The collaboration aims to secure sensitive data within cloud, corporate, and data center configurations.
This announcement represents a major event in the Quantum Computing era, where traditional encryption methods, as used in modern digital communications, could be made obsolete as soon as quantum computers powerful enough become a reality. (To know more about Quantum Computing, how it is changing entire technology sectors, click here.)
Why This Matters: The Quantum Threat to Encryption
Classical cryptographic systems, including widely used techniques such as RSA and ECC, rely on mathematical problems that have been shown to be unbreakable using a classical computer system. However, quantum computers have a fundamentally different architecture and can, at least in theory, crack these mathematical problems much more efficiently. As quantum computer technology is developed to a more advanced state, it seems that the very encryption techniques we rely on today to keep our data safe can and will be cracked, including “harvest now, decrypt later” techniques, which attempt to intercept data today with the aim of decrypting it when quantum computers can handle the task.
Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is an area of interest in Cybersecurity that aims to introduce “quantum-safe” encryption algorithms. Moving towards “PQC” has thus become a pressing need for the industry, with enterprises across various sectors around the world considering it a priority, considering how crucial data security is. (Explore the vast concept of Quantum Computing, how it will influence various sectors in the technology industry.)
What Orange Business and Cisco Are Delivering
The technical integration of Orange Business with Cisco concentrates on standards-based, pervasive implementation of PQC within network infrastructure. This ensures quantum-safe authentication and communications across WAN infrastructures. Some of the essential components of the solution include:
PQC-Secured WAN Services Today: Orange Business has already enabled PQC-secured WAN connectivity across its worldwide network infrastructure, offering organizations immediate access to secure data-in-transit solutions that are secure against quantum computers.
Managed PQC SD-WAN Services Managed Cisco SD-WAN with PQC support is expected to become available in Q3 of 2026, enabling the management of quantum-safe SD-WAN services.
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Crypto-Agility: Cloud or network administrators can change or replace cryptographic algorithms to respond to advancing standards, which is an important feature considering PQC standards are developing.
With its service, named crypto-agile and PQC-enabled networking, both companies look to provide their enterprise customers with future-proof data confidentiality assurances, spanning communications in the cloud, between sites, and also between organizations, without requiring compromising hardware upgrades in case of changing security standards.
Impact on the Quantum Computing Industry and Technology Landscape
1. Accelerating Quantum-Safe Infrastructure Adoption
This partnership underscores the fact that organizations are moving beyond the theoretical discussion of quantum-based threat mitigation and embracing practical implementations. Although practical quantum computers that can defeat traditional encryption methods may take a number of years to materialize, PQC adoption ensures that organizations can take advantage of future realities without compromising current capabilities.
With the development and embedding of further quantum-resistant capabilities in our core infrastructure, industries like finance, healthcare, telecommunications, and government, which handle very sensitive information, will be able to improve their resilience to existing and future security challenges.
2. Reinforcing Standards-Driven Quantum-Safe Ecosystems
Similarly, industry groups and cyber alliances are also focusing on standardized approaches to quantum-safe cryptography to achieve interoperability while eliminating fragmentation risks. Programs such as the Quantum-Safe 360 Alliance, which provides best practices on migrations including PQC, underscore the need for collaborative strategies to achieve quantum-safe cryptography.
The Orange-Cisco initiative is consistent with this philosophy of standards-based approaches, ensuring that enterprises can deploy PQC with the confidence of knowing that these systems will remain compatible with the latest global cryptographic standards.
What This Means for Businesses
Enhanced Security Posture and Trust
Companies moving to quantum-safe networking will have longer-term data confidentiality and trustworthiness, which is a real competitive differentiator in speeding digital transformation with increasing cyber threats.
Reduced Future Migration Risk
Embedding PQC capabilities today eliminates the need for expensive, disruptive retrofits of security infrastructure in the future. Crypto-agile frameworks enable organizations to easily adapt to changing PQC standards with minimal disruption.
New Opportunities for Service Providers
A telecom or managed service company that offers products or services based on quantum-safe technology will experience differentiation benefits gained from entering a crowded marketplace, meeting customer requirements that are focused on security and long-term data protection.
Conclusion
The partnership between Orange Business and Cisco is thus seen as an important move forward towards delivering quantum-secure information infrastructure. Therefore, it can be stated that as quantum computing continues to advance rapidly, it will be a strategic advantage, as securing communications with PQC, especially via crypto-agile networks, will become a necessary, and not an optional, upgrade.
Notably, for businesses that want to safeguard critical data from the threat of quantum computing systems in the future, a significantly new trend in the approach to security, the best time for quantification technologies is now.