James Hewitt is an engineer. He has spent three decades designing, commissioning, and securing industrial control systems in energy and utilities. He started as a programmable logic controller engineer on steel plant projects at GE and went on to spend 14 years at Siemens. The equipment he works on has a service life of 15 to 40 years. Operators of such equipment therefore change cryptography on a different schedule from enterprise IT teams.
He is Director of Quantum Readiness for Operational Technology at Applied Quantum, based in Vancouver. He designs quantum readiness strategies for industrial control systems, long-lived assets, and safety-critical environments. He advises energy, utility, and industrial clients on cryptographic exposure, crypto-agility, and phased transition approaches that fit operational lifecycles.
He is also a quantum security engineer at Secure Quantum. There he assesses long-term cryptographic risk for systems that will still be running decades from now, and advises on interim controls where full migration is not yet feasible. For six years before that he consulted independently on operational technology and connected device security across Canada and the United States. His clients were large electric utilities, oil and gas operators, and energy infrastructure owners, and the work covered control system architecture across generation, transmission, substations, and pipelines.
At Siemens he managed transmission and distribution compliance programs against the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s critical infrastructure protection standards, through the version 3 to version 5 transition. He was a senior regulatory consultant at TÜV SÜD and a senior cybersecurity engineer at Cyber Agency.
At Quantum Academy, Hewitt teaches quantum readiness for operational technology. His material covers why an enterprise migration playbook fails in a substation, and what replaces it.