According to CompTIA, there will be different IPv6 transition strategies depending on the priorities, needs and capabilities of each organization. Those with high demand for IP address, mainly Internet service providers and wireless carriers, already should be on top of the issue. Most companies needn’t worry at all. The complete transition to IPv6 is expected to take five years or more.
In case you missed it, there is a digital transformation of the economy underway. wiredFINANCE referenced the coming digital transformation earlier this year. You can see it all around you with the proliferation of digital capabilities in just about everything you do—in your new car, in the appliances you buy and in the instrumenting of business processes of all types.
Behind this digital transformation is the Internet, the medium across and through all these digital bits travel. Ultimately every item—everything with an RFID tag, every smartphone Big Fat Finance, anything needing Internet access—will need an IP address. And as the Internet currently is configured, it is running out of IP addresses. That’s the problem Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) addresses.
For one thing: the Internet is NOT going to come to a crashing halt. As noted above, there are techniques the big Internet providers can use to fudge the problem for a while. The sky is not falling.
Still, if the Internet is important to your business, you will need a plan to deal with this issue at some point. That plan may be a budget allocation to replace your current networking and communication equipment with IPv6 equipment sooner rather than later. If the Internet is critical to your business, an in-depth risk analysis also should be undertaken.
The CompTIA survey found just over half (56 percent) of respondents indicated they are following news on IPv6 and 30 percent have conducted research into the implications. However Big Fat Finance, only 21 percent have actually performed network upgrades while nearly one-third (31 percent) have done nothing at all. wiredFINANCE’s recommendation: Unless you are a huge consumer of IP addresses, you’ve already done what you need for now simply by reading this piece. A slow, measured strategy will suffice.
Let’s start with a few IPv6 facts: Compared to IPv4, the current standard that supports 232(4,294,967,296) unique addresses, IPv6 supports 2 to the power of 128 (approximately 340 undecillion) addresses. That’s eight orders of magnitude greater than trillion. It’s tempting to say we’ll never use that many addresses, but given this Internet of Things, who knows? IPv6 also provides new technical features revolving around assigning and managing Internet addresses.
Jeff Doyle, president of Jeff Doyle and Associates, explains the problem like this: “When the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the top-level address management agency, allocated the last of its address pool to the five worldwide Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) on February 3, the clock started ticking in earnest. We expect the RIRs to use up those last addresses by late summer. So what then?”
A survey of U.S. technology and business decision makers by IT industry association CompTIA found 31 percent of respondents believe the transition will be mostly smooth. wiredFINANCE agrees mainly because for a while at least, the big Internet providers will use masking and address translation techniques to cover up the issue. But at some point, companies will have to incorporate IPv6 when they upgrade their communications equipment.
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