Not If But When

"The religious war of should we or shouldn’t we move to IPv6 is over," says Tom Patterson, CEO of the IPv6 consultancy Command Information. "It is a matter of when." But CIOs can’t afford to just sit back and wait for the new Internet to come swoop them up. They need to actively plan upgrades of everything on their network to IPv6-capable versions if they wish to avoid the complexity, security risks and extra cost of maintaining two protocols over the long haul. Every router, laptop, application and anything else connected to the Internet will continue to work side-by-side with the old, but in a much more efficient manner. The critical question is whether to work the transition into your normal technology refresh cycle, or wait and absorb a massive one-time hit when competitive pressure forces you to move to IPv6.

The good news is that there is no Y2K-like deadline, which means CIOs have time to develop a plan and invest at a gradual pace to avoid the extra costs and risks of a sudden switchover. "If you don’t prepare correctly you will create headaches that you don’t need to have," says Yanick Pouffary, a technology director of the North American IPv6 Task Force and fellow with the IPv6 Forum.

Good planning starts with viewing IPv6 as more than a tactical issue. "Don’t just look at this as a hardware refresh," says John McManus, acting CIO of NASA and the cochairman of the federal CIO Council’s IPv6 Working Group. Upgrading to IPv6, he says, will help you reduce network costs and complexity, and facilitate new services that are limited only by your imagination. And while McManus says that "there are 100,000 things that can go wrong if you don’t do this right," actually doing it right is surprisingly simple. And if you start now, it doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive. What follows is a six-step guide to help CIOs upgrade to IPv6 with the minimal possible expense and the greatest possible benefit.

Step One

Don’t Miss the IPv6 Boat

The Internet protocol is the Internet’s version of a postal envelope, containing information such as the destination and return addresses, and details about a package’s contents. The current standard, IPv4, was developed in 1976, back when the Internet was inhabited by a small group of government researchers and academics and the prospect of using up the protocol’s total of 4.3 billion addresses seemed wildly improbable. IPv4 also didn’t have any security or mobility features.