The sky has been falling on the IPv4 protocol for a long time, but now that end users can practically reach up and touch that sky, they need to prepare in earnest for the transition to IPv6. Verizon Business has developed some guidelines for governments and enterprises to asses their readiness and begin to move.
According to ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers), fewer than 5.5 percent of IPv4 addresses remain and they may be gone by next year. “Depletion is real. Don’t get caught,” said Richard Jimmerson, chief information officer at ARIN.
There is still time for a common sense approach to a transition, said William Schmidlapp, senior consultant in product marketing with Verizon Business, but things are starting to move fast. Schmidlapp said in that in the last three months almost a full 1 percent of address depletion has occurred. “From 6.2 percent [reserve] in June to a little under 5.5 percent by September. That’s pretty aggressive from a user standpoint,” he said.
In addition to offering its services to customers, Verizon Buisness outlined its common-sense approach in the following five tips and guidelines for transition.
Determine the business impact. Enterprises should gain an understanding of the IPv4 address depletion situation and IPv6 address transition by reading studies authored by industry analysts and other experts. They should look to answer the following questions:
- Is your network continuing to expand into new locations that will require publicly-routed IP addressing?
- Does your business depend on the Internet for e-commerce or content hosting? (Consumer-focused businesses and online social networks for example may be among the first wave to be affected by the IPv4 address depletion.)
- How do IPv6-centric applications such as Windows Direct Access affect your business?
- How will 4G wireless networks affect the connectivity of smartphones and wireless network appliances to your organization’s infrastructure?
“Customers know IPv6 but haven’t dug into the nuts and bolts of the differences between IPv6 and IPv4 and what the compatibilities mean or how it would impact their business,” Schmidlapp said. “So we are instructing them to look first at anything that requires access to the Internet or delivering Internet services.”
Determine if your service provider has a plan. Learn your service provider’s timelines for delivering IPv6 coverage, their implementation methods for connecting your business to the IPv4 and IPv6-addressed Internets, and how these methods will affect your business if, for example, you rely on geographical IP reporting or your network transports time-sensitive information.
Evaluate your business’ internal infrastructure. Determine which equipment is IPv6-compatible and which will require upgrading, as well as which methods of IPv6 transport will work for the various segments within your infrastructure. Ask these questions:
