Post-Quantum Readiness with Gigamon: The PQC Easy Button

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Hello everyone, Ryan here and I've got my favorite topic for you today, post-quantum readiness and the PQC Easy Button.

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Now much has been written about quantum computing and the threats that come with it.

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Today we're going to focus on what you can do about it.

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This is how to take control of your post-quantum readiness program.

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I started by looking at what others are saying about PQC and it turns out that every major tech company, influencer, and even the US federal government says the time to act is upon us.

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Even if you're not worried about the risk today, Gartner predicts cost will rise substantially for those who wait for tomorrow.

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They predict a talent grab spurred by upcoming regulatory and standards compliance hitting all companies around the same time.

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So if you're here, you're probably already aware that quantum computing is poised to turn cryptography on its head, that well-funded global actors are intercepting traffic today expecting to decrypted in a few years, and that mandates are coming in to adopt a post-quantum cryptography posture across all IT systems everywhere.

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But for many organizations, understanding their cryptography exposure has been surprisingly elusive.

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It's embedded in applications, APIs, east-west traffic, cloud workloads, containers, and 3rd party services.

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It lives inside uninventoried IoT devices, and it falls between the cracks when there is no clear owner.

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Today I'm going to show you how Gigamon turns PQC readiness from this elusive nightmare into a manageable, measurable program so that you can take control, you can audit, and you can finish ahead of schedule.

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And this is what I want for you, that when the PQC requirements arrive, you will be armed with you visibility agency and control you need, having deployed Gigamon as your PQC easy button.

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If you are wondering when the mandates might come in, here's a quick look at a timeline.

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The initial wave of compliance frameworks are expected in late 26 and into 27.

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After that, the GRC teams will pick them up and get them into the security teams.

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Depending on which frameworks you adhere to, this specific time could vary for you.

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If you are one of these early adopters, that's great.

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If not, consider Gartner's advice that things will get very expensive until late 2027 and 2028.

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The US federal government have kicked off the requirements in June of this year, with the Office of Management and Budget mandating that all federal agencies must be quantum safe by 20-30.

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But of course, the most sensitive networks aren't waiting around for that day to come.

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So if you are faced with PQC readiness, where do you begin?

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We alluded to a GRC intake process a moment ago and most orgs will probably assign ownership to a specific person.

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Maybe they will even have a fancy title like PQC czar are.

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Maybe this person is you.

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And if you are considering a traditional execution plan, it might look something like this where the first step is to identify what are the critical applications on the network.

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Then create say a 50 part questionnaire for the application owners to fill out.

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And then you have them create remediation plans, self-report their progress.

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You have to constantly follow, probably even have to step in and personally handle some of them.

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Then you have to hassle and pester the application owners to meet the deadlines.

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And by the way, you also have to report regular status to the executives based on this information coming from people outside of your control.

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And that's challenging for them to collect this data as well, and then a year later, initiate a second round with even more apps, go through the whole thing again, and after that, still left without a way to conduct audits.

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This doesn't sound so easy to me.

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So that's why we have the PQC Easy button.

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Let's look at doing this in a totally different way.

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So what if you had complete visibility about everything on the network you could discover?

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So this begins with using network visibility data from Gigamon for discovery and inventory.

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So instead of having to rely on others to self-report, you get total control.

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You can then move into the execute phase where you can quickly build a punch list of systems and servers that need upgrading.

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Instead of waiting on the application owners to inventory their own servers and services.

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You will already have this information that you can in fact share with them and help them out.

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Third is reporting.

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It's because when it comes time to report back to leadership or the board, you have all this data in hand and reporting becomes almost trivial.

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The fourth step, my personal favorite, is incentivize.

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Now, if you want the Ultimate and Ultimate easy buttons, I recommend putting the reporting data into an application scorecard with executive visibility and watch your application owners work to get themselves off the naughty list, so to speak.

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And after all that, you now have the auditing in place and you can see when a new asset is added to the network and take action if it's not compliant.

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As a summary, with Gigamon you don't rely on self-reporting and you don't wait for application owners.

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Instead, you control your own destiny.

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So how does all this work?

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What is Gigamon doing behind the scenes to provide you with this visibility?

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Well, begins with the simple fact that Gigamon is the leader in network visibility.

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This visibility comes from independent taps on the network that are non-intrusive to servers, routers, switches or applications.

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With Gigamon you get visibility everywhere, north-south, east-west, virtual containers, public cloud, anywhere and everywhere on the network, OT and IoT included.

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And then Gigamon will identify the TLS protocol and it'll identify the PQC cipher for all encrypted traffic on your network.

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Gigamon converts that visibility into metadata available for reporting from a SIEM or a data lake.

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If you use agentic AI at your organization, this data is also AI ready, which I will show you a screenshot of in a moment.

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And so this gets us the PQC classification for all encrypted traffic on your network, complete with IP addresses.

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And when those IPs are matched with an internal lookup, then you also get the internal app name and owner.

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Let's look at a couple examples.

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The first one is a table that is generated from Gigamon Insights, which is Gigamon's agentic AI tool.

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You do not have to use Gigamon's AI, you can totally use your own, but with Gigamon Insights.

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In this demo environment, it quickly built a profile of all encrypted traffic in the network and classified everything into four categories, the first one being PQC safe.

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This is traffic running the PQC cipher ML-KEM.

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What is PQC capable?

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This is traffic running TLS 1.3 but does not have the PQC cipher, or at least it wasn't negotiated on the network.

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3rd, what is PQC vulnerable?

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This is traffic that is running TLS 1.2 but needs up, needs to upgrade the protocol and the cipher, and then last is critically weak.

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This is traffic running older versions of TLS or SSL which probably should have been upgraded 5 or 10 years ago.

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And now that you have that table, that visibility, you can follow it up with more prompts to get a punch list like this list of IPS at the bottom with the non PQC save traffic that you can then supply to your application owners to jump start the remediation program.

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Now this data isn't limited to AI, you can also access it through a classic SIEM dashboard.

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This is from a separate demo environment, but it has this nice pie chart and performs scoring and tracks and over times.

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There's a lot of cool things you can do in a Splunk or Elastic dashboard or any SIEM dashboard of your choice.

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So this is what I want for you, that when the PQC requirements arrive, you will be armed with the visibility agency and control you need, having deployed Gigamon as your PQC Easy button.

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If you have questions or would like to take the next step, use this QR code to get in touch with an expert or contact me directly at the e-mail address on the screen.

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Thank you very much.