The quantum train – Third station: choosing your car

When boarding a train for a long journey, no one brings their entire house. We instinctively choose what deserves to come along: the essential items, the important documents, the personal belongings we genuinely care about. Everything else stays behind.

This image may seem trivial, but it illustrates remarkably well one of the greatest challenges organizations will face in the coming years. Faced with accelerating technological transformations, and more particularly with the gradual arrival of quantum computing, the real question is not only how to protect your data. It is first of all to determine which data genuinely has value.

For more than thirty years, companies have accumulated impressive volumes of information. Storage costs have fallen, digital infrastructure has become widely accessible, and collaboration tools have multiplied the opportunities to create, copy, and archive data. Emails, contracts, plans, technical drawings, transaction histories, backups, databases, working documents, and successive file versions often pile up without any real retention strategy. This abundance has become the norm, to the point where many organizations do not themselves know the extent of their information assets.

Yet not all of this information carries the same importance. Some of it has only limited operational value and will naturally disappear over time. Other information, by contrast, constitutes the organization's true capital. It holds the know-how accumulated over the years, the innovations that distinguish the company from its competitors, the trade secrets that secure its strategic advantage, or the sensitive information entrusted to it by its customers and partners.

It is striking to note that many companies know precisely the value of their buildings, their equipment, or their inventories, while being unable to identify the few data sets whose loss would genuinely jeopardize their future. Yet in an economy where information is becoming one of an organization's main assets, this knowledge should be part of the foundations of any governance strategy.

Quantum computing adds a new dimension to this reflection. This technology is often presented through the lens of computing power or its consequences for cryptographic mechanisms. These challenges are very real, but they do not concern all data in the same way. An advertising campaign, a production schedule, or an administrative document does not necessarily need to remain confidential for several decades. Conversely, a pharmaceutical formula, an industrial process, a proprietary algorithm, a defense strategy, or certain personal information may need to be protected for twenty, thirty, or even fifty years.

This notion of the lifespan of information is often overlooked, when it should guide a large part of security decisions. Data that loses all value after a few weeks does not require the same protection mechanisms as an information asset whose confidentiality is still a strategic issue several decades later. Before choosing a technology, an encryption algorithm, or a security architecture, an organization should therefore start by answering a far simpler question: what are we really trying to protect?

This approach goes well beyond the field of cybersecurity. It is first and foremost a matter of governance. It forces leaders to reflect on the purpose of their data, on how long it should be retained, on who needs to access it, on the regulatory obligations that apply to it, and on the value it will continue to represent over time. It also raises another, often uncomfortable question: does all information really deserve to be kept? In many cases, the best way to protect a piece of data may simply be to stop keeping it once it no longer provides any value.

Over recent decades, organizations have learned to accumulate data. The coming years will require them to learn how to qualify it. This shift probably represents one of the most significant changes in digital governance. It will no longer be only about protecting information, but about understanding its true value before deciding how, and to what extent, it deserves to be protected.

For Quantum Beyond, digital sovereignty does not begin with the choice of a technology. It begins with a thorough understanding of what makes up an organization's information assets. Without this understanding, investments in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, or quantum computing risk serving poorly defined priorities.

Before the quantum train really picks up speed, every organization would do well to open its suitcases one last time. Not to add more baggage, but to distinguish clearly between what is merely useful and what is truly irreplaceable. Because those are the assets that will deserve all our attention when the journey enters its next stage.