Orange Business and Cisco announced a strategic collaboration to deliver Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC)-secured solutions across the Orange Business global network infrastructure. This initiative aims to strengthen data protection for enterprise and public sector customers by securing network traffic against emerging quantum computing threats.
Orange Business has achieved a significant industry milestone as the first European service provider to offer PQC-secured global networking services built on Cisco 8000 Series Secure Routers. These solutions are specifically engineered for the quantum era to ensure robust, long-lasting security for critical network communications.
PQC-secured Wide Area Network (WAN) services are available now, with managed Cisco SD-WAN offerings protected by PQC on track for commercial rollout in calendar year Q3 2026. This phased deployment ensures that sensitive data traversing corporate environments, cloud platforms, and data centers remains secure even as quantum computing advances.
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As quantum computing progresses, many classical cryptographic methods widely used today will face increasing vulnerability. This shift creates a growing risk that data could be captured now and decrypted later once quantum capabilities reach maturity a risk often described as the “Harvest now, Decrypt Later” threat. Integrating PQC into Cisco’s SD-WAN infrastructure provides an accessible software-based solution especially when delivered as a managed service to help customers defend both present and future data assets.
By embedding PQC into SD-WAN, both the control plane and data plane of network architectures become quantum-safe, ensuring secure site interconnection, authentication, and key exchange. More importantly, this integrated approach future-proofs the entire WAN environment rather than protecting individual encrypted tunnels in isolation.
Strengthening the Orange Quantum Defender Portfolio
The deployment of PQC over Cisco SD, WAN is the latest addition to the Orange Quantum Defender portfolio, Orange Business’s quantum, safe networking leadership being reinforced on this occasion. The new offering is part of a broader strategy whereby Orange prepares its enterprise and mission, critical customers to the quantum computing’s impact by integrating post, quantum security at the network core instead of as a retrofit upgrade.
One of the strategy’s key points is crypto, agility, which allows network environments to be quickly adapted to the changing cryptographic standards and threats. Organizations that design frameworks that allow cryptographic algorithms to be upgraded or changed with minimal disruption are better able to ensure confidentiality over extended data lifecycles.
Working in unison, Orange Business and Cisco, through adopting a standards, aligned approach to quantum, safe networking, are setting out the path for organizations to safeguard their operations and keep trust intact as the digital threats continue evolving. It is envisaged thus that there will be secure communications and digital services not only today but also in the future without necessitating the customers’ infrastructures undergoing disruptive or sudden changes.