Building your cryptographic inventory: A customer strategy for cryptographic posture management

This Microsoft Security guidance article focuses on post-quantum cryptography (PQC) readiness and cryptographic inventory management. Organizations face significant challenges in identifying where cryptography is deployed across applications, infrastructure, devices, and services. The article emphasizes that effective cryptographic posture management (CPM) is an ongoing lifecycle requiring continuous discovery, risk assessment, prioritization, and remediation. Key drivers include regulatory requirements from 15 countries and the EU, including DORA and PCI DSS 4.0. Microsoft recommends a customer-led operating model with six stages: Discover, Normalize, Assess risk, Prioritize, Remediate, and Continuous monitoring. The foundation of quantum-safe security is comprehensive visibility—organizations cannot protect or migrate cryptographic assets they cannot identify. This strategic guidance helps security teams build the agility needed to respond quickly to emerging vulnerabilities and evolving standards.

Learn how to build a comprehensive cryptographic inventory and strengthen quantum‑safe readiness using Microsoft Security tools, best‑practice lifecycle models, and partner solutions. The post Building your cryptographic inventory: A customer strategy for cryptographic posture management appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog .

This Microsoft Security guidance article focuses on post-quantum cryptography (PQC) readiness and cryptographic inventory management. Organizations face significant challenges in identifying where cryptography is deployed across applications, infrastructure, devices, and services. The article emphasizes that effective cryptographic posture management (CPM) is an ongoing lifecycle requiring continuous discovery, risk assessment, prioritization, and remediation. Key drivers include regulatory requirements from 15 countries and the EU, including DORA and PCI DSS 4.0. Microsoft recommends a customer-led operating model with six stages: Discover, Normalize, Assess risk, Prioritize, Remediate, and Continuous monitoring. The foundation of quantum-safe security is comprehensive visibility—organizations cannot protect or migrate cryptographic assets they cannot identify. This strategic guidance helps security teams build the agility needed to respond quickly to emerging vulnerabilities and evolving standards. Learn how to build a comprehensive cryptographic inventory and strengthen quantum‑safe readiness using Microsoft Security tools, best‑practice lifecycle models, and partner solutions. The post Building your cryptographic inventory: A customer strategy for cryptographic posture management appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog . Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is coming—and for most organizations, the hardest part won’t be choosing new algorithms. It will be finding where cryptography is used today across applications, infrastructure, devices, and services so teams can plan, prioritize, and modernize with confidence. At Microsoft, we view this as the practical foundation of quantum readiness: you can’t protect or migrate what you can’t see. As described in our Quantum Safe Program strategy , cryptography is embedded in all modern IT environments across every industry: in applications, network protocols, cloud services, and hardware devices. It also evolves constantly to ensure the best protection from newly discovered vulnerabilities, evolving standards from bodies like NIST and IETF, and emerging regulatory requirements. However, many organizations face a widespread challenge: without a comprehensive inventory and effective lifecycle process, they lack the visibility and agility needed to keep their infrastructure secure and up to date. As a result, when new vulnerabilities or mandates emerge, teams often struggle to quickly identify affected assets, determine ownership, and prioritize remediation efforts. This underscores the importance of establishing clear, ongoing inventory practices as a foundation for resilient management across the enterprise. The first and most critical step toward a quantum-safe future—and sound cryptographic hygiene in general—is building a comprehensive cryptographic inventory . PQC adoption (like any cryptographic transition) is ultimately an engineering and operations exercise: you are updating cryptography across real systems with real dependencies, and you need visibility to do it safely. In this post, we will define what a cryptographic inventory is, outline a practical customer-led operating model for managing cryptographic posture, and show how customers can start quickly using Microsoft Security capabilities and our partners. Learn more about quantum-safe security What is a cryptographic inventory? A cryptographic inventory is a living catalog of all the cryptographic assets and mechanisms in use across your organization. This includes the following examples: Category Examples/Details Certificates and keys X.509 certificates, private/public key pairs, certificate authorities, key management systems Protocols and cipher suites TLS/SSL versions and configurations, SSH protocols, IPsec implementations Cryptographic libraries OpenSSL, LibCrypt, SymCrypt, other libraries embedded in applications Algorithms in code Cryptographic primitives referenced in source code (RSA, ECC, AES, hashing functions) Encrypted session metadata Active network sessions using encryption, protocol handshake details Secrets and credentials API keys, connection strings, service principal credentials stored in code, configuration files, or vaults Hardware security modules (HSMs) Physical and virtual HSMs, Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) Why does this inventory matter? First, governance and compliance : 15 countries and the EU recommend or require some subset of organizations to do cryptographic inventorying. These are implemented through regulations like DORA, government policies like OMB M-23-02, and industry security standards like PCI DSS 4.0. We expect the number and scope of these polices to grow globally. Second, risk prioritization : Cryptographic assets present varying levels of risk. For example, an internet-facing TLS endpoint using weak ciphers poses different threats compared to an internal test certificate, or local disk encryption utilizing the AES standard. Maintaining a comprehensive...