ICT

Home>Wider Community and Schools>Applications>ICT

Companies and governments rely on being able to encrypt data for secure information sharing, from financial transactions, to sharing health records, to managing smart grids. They turn to the ICT industry to install and manage the systems and services that deliver this encryption. In a quantum-enabled world, it will be vital that the ICT industry has quantum safe encryption, including QKD, a mature quantum technology for the secure distribution of encryption keys, as part of its arsenal. QKD will need physical integration into network infrastructure, as well as accompanying software to deploy and utilise it effectively. The ICT industry will be required to both develop new QKD products, and to deliver these as parts of integrated networked solutions. Commercial offerings are already viable in highly secure applications, where the benefits of securing information from future hacking outweighs the current cost. A number of projects are already exploring QKD links, for example between secure corporate networks and data centres. Over the next five years significant work will go into improving transmission rates and reducing size, weight and power – and of course cost – of quantum devices, bringing QKD solutions closer to market, and leading to the first commercial use cases.