IPv6 Is Coming Whether IT Deparments Are Ready or Not

CIO —

The only trouble was, hardly anyone in the government—or anywhere else—knew what he was talking about.

IPv6 is the international standard chosen by the Internet Engineering Task Force to replace the current protocol, IPv4 (version 5 never made it out of the gate). It is more secure and can extend Internet connectivity to a nearly infinite number of devices, while at the same time reducing network management costs by as much as a third.

Stenbit’s announcement was designed to give an IPv6 ecosystem a chance to develop gradually within the DoD. "Moving to IPv6 takes a long time," says Stenbit, who retired from the DoD in 2004. "Within the DoD procurement system, big bucks are bet on [systems] that come out five years later. If the people who are working on those systems don’t know what IP version we will be using [in the future] then they will just build them with today’s protocol and we will lose the ability to move forward."

To date, however, few U.S. companies have followed in the DoD’s footsteps. Nor, for that matter, have the past three years brought an increase in IPv6 awareness. A recent CIO Executive Council poll on IPv6 adoption had only two responses, and neither of those CIOs was using IPv6. In a sense, that is understandable; the current version of the Internet works just fine, and to date there hasn’t been a lot of pressure to move.

But that’s about to change.

Last-Mover Disadvantage

Outside the United States, the transition to IPv6 is well under way. China, Japan and Korea have all made moving to IPv6 a national priority, as has the European Union. China, in particular, is building a new Internet based entirely on IPv6 that it hopes will allow it to become the world’s leader in all things Internet (see "China Builds a Better Internet," www.cio

.com/071506).

In the United States, many of the hurdles that have stood in the way of IPv6 adoption are about to disappear, thanks in large part to the DoD’s move and a subsequent rule requiring federal agencies to transition their networks to IPv6 by 2008. Advances in hardware, software and telecommunications have guaranteed that the transition will happen in the United States as well—with or without the cooperation of CIOs.

For example, many network equipment makers, led by Cisco and Juniper, have been selling routers and switches that are IPv6 compatible for several years. On the software front, Microsoft’s upcoming Vista operating system will have IPv6 as its default protocol, and Windows Vista has several collaborative features that work with IPv6. Finally, the major telecom companies are quietly upgrading their networks to carry IPv6 traffic—keeping themselves in the running (they hope) for a General Services Administration telecommunications contract valued at $20 billion over the next 10 years that requires carriers to have IPv6-capable networks.

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