Quantum computing recently opened a door to numerous applications addressing complex problems that cannot be practically solved with classical systems. This, however, poses significant challenges to the stability and security of the system, particularly w.r.t. qubit decoherence and quantum error rates. Likewise, quantum cryptography, especially QKD, is very promising for secure reliable communications but must be supported by certain strong pillars to ensure reliability. This paper discusses how Site Reliability Engineering principles (observability, incident response, scalability, fault tolerance, etc.) can be adapted to solve the same problems as in classical settings but for the new challenges posed by quantum systems. With a wealth of experience across large-scale classical computing systems, how SRE is applied and managed is well understood, though we have scarcely entered the quantum domain. In this paper, we introduce a framework to adopt the SRE principles in quantum computing and quantum cryptographic systems to enhance the reliability, scalability and the security of quantum systems. In this paper, the authors study the challenges that are inherent to quantum systems, such as error rates, scalability restrictions, and the cryptographic threats posed by quantum algorithms, such as Shor’s algorithm. By exploring theoretical scenarios followed by case studies, we demonstrate and showcase how principles of SRE can help minimize these challenges by improving the monitoring, error handling and resilience of quantum systems. Lastly, we present a path forward for automating and recovering from this complexity in the future with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)-based approaches to ensure that future quantum applications will be stable and secure.