Ever since Intel co-founder Gordon Moore identified, with amazing accuracy, the pattern and pace of technological advancement, it has served as a reliable guide for innovation. Moore’s Law, which states that the number of components per integrated circuit doubles every 18 months, has been the standard measurement and projection for long-term planning and research and development.

But now that storage has been achieved at the atomic level, it could be argued that we have reached the ultimate, intractable limit for Moore’s Law.

Perhaps.

Another possibility, though, is that Moore’s Law will soon hit warp speed — driving certain innovations and breakthroughs at polynomial speeds — thanks to the rapidly approaching reality of quantum computing.

While it may strike some as strange to be discussing an acceleration of Moore’s 18-month timeline by a technology that even the most aggressive estimates predict will not be a reality for more than a decade, the impact of quantum will be seismic. And the fact is, nobody really knows exactly how quickly it will be felt or how it will be applied.

But just going by predictive models and research, it is clear that quantum’s power is beyond comparison to anything we have today. Though the applications for quantum computing will certainly be limited at first, there are also clear certainties of how its power can be applied, particularly in the fields of AI, genetic research, engineering and economics — challenges that are known as optimization problems.

For anyone tasked with securing critical infrastructure (bridges, dams, electrical grids, nuclear facilities, critical manufacturing, communications systems and financial services), this is why the arrival and power of quantum computing might be keeping them up at night.

Because of all the optimization problems, the low-hanging fruit that quantum computing will be able to pick is, unfortunately, a critical fundamental of cybersecurity: encryption.