Quantum Security, Quantum Cryptography

CVS Health’s ex-CIO joins Qtonic Quantum to secure records

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August 13, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Qtonic Quantum has appointed Raymond Auger, former CIO of CVS Health’s retail division, which operates over 10,000 locations, and Enterprise CTO, as Strategic Technology Advisor. Auger brings thirty-five years of experience securing data within large organizations that have undergone acquisitions, and his arrival coincides with a critical threat to the healthcare industry: the long-term vulnerability of patient records.

Qtonic Quantum Co-Founder and CTO David Cohen states that healthcare presents the most challenging version of this problem, with the least margin for error. This appointment follows the June 24, 2026, issuance of OMB M-26-15, requiring federal agencies to plan for migration to post-quantum cryptography.

Raymond Auger’s thirty-five years of experience managing technology through large-scale acquisitions now focuses on a critical vulnerability in healthcare data security. The threat of attacks on patient records is becoming increasingly concrete, as confidentiality must extend for a lifetime and beyond. This urgency stems from evolving cryptographic standards; NIST signals deprecation of current algorithms around 2030, with disallowance expected by 2035. OMB Memorandum M-26-15, issued on June 24, 2026, mandated federal agencies create plans for migrating to post-quantum cryptography, creating immediate pressure to identify and address legacy systems.

Auger emphasizes the long-term implications of data breaches, explaining that “a medical record has to stay confidential for a patient’s lifetime and past it.” He further clarifies that organizations cannot begin securing data until they first discover where it resides, a challenge amplified by inaccurate inventories common in acquired companies. Qtonic Quantum intends to leverage Auger’s experience to help healthcare organizations locate and remediate these vulnerabilities before they are exploited.

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Tags:
Cryptography Healthcare NIST
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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