On October 27, 2026, NIST released the final version of IR 8547, Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards. The dates survived from the 2024 draft intact: quantum-vulnerable public-key algorithms, RSA and the elliptic-curve families among them, are deprecated after 2030 and disallowed under federal standards after 2035. What changed is the status. A draft is a signal. A final report is a citation.
Why going final matters more than it sounds
Nobody rewrites a procurement contract around a draft. Now the reference document exists in finished form, and the machinery that was waiting on it can engage. Executive Order 14412 set agency clocks and a proposed FAR rule for federal contractors; NSM-10 set 2035 as the completion target for the federal migration. IR 8547 is the technical companion those documents point at, and the NIST announcement says plainly that organizations working with the federal government will be affected as well. The federal cycle has historically bled into commercial audit frameworks about two years behind, which puts post-quantum questions on security questionnaires well before 2030.
The first instruction has not changed: count what you run
A transition plan is a schedule for retiring algorithms, and you cannot schedule the retirement of an algorithm you have not found. Every mandate in this space begins with inventory: which algorithms, which keys, which certificates, where they live, what they protect. The machine-readable form of that answer is a CBOM, and if you operate under PCI DSS you already owe a close cousin of it under requirement 12.3.3. One inventory, produced once, serves both obligations.
Our free scanner classifies every finding it makes as quantum-vulnerable, hybrid, post-quantum, or symmetric. That field is the IR 8547 question answered per asset: when the deprecation dates arrive, the quantum-vulnerable rows are your backlog, already counted and already located.
Hybrid is the sanctioned bridge
The final report keeps the pragmatic path open: combining conventional and post-quantum schemes is accepted as a transition approach, at some computational cost. This is the configuration browsers already negotiate and the one our gateway terminates by default, X25519MLKEM768 on every handshake with no opt-in. Running hybrid today is no longer early adoption. It is the documented bridge.
Who the dates actually bind
Honestly: IR 8547 governs federal standards. If you sell to the federal government, or to anyone who does, the dates reach you through contracts and FIPS-validated environments. If you do not, they reach you more slowly, through auditors and frameworks that follow NIST. The part that waits for nobody is harvest now, decrypt later: traffic recorded this year is decryptable the day an adversary's quantum hardware arrives, which is why NIST suggests prioritizing ML-KEM for data that must stay confidential for years. Health records and payment data are the canonical examples, and they are exactly the data our customers handle.
What to do this quarter
Run the free scanner against one repository this week. It takes an afternoon, emits a CycloneDX 1.6 CBOM with quantum classification on every finding, runs inside your environment, and uploads nothing. If the estate is hundreds of repositories, we roll per-repository results into a single management view; ask us. The 2030 date did not move this month. What moved is that it is now official, and the calm teams will be the ones who started counting while it was still far away.