Why Enterprise IPv6 Never Took Off - A Short & Crisp Business Perspective (For Sanity)

 

It's been only 30 years or so when the first IPv6 IETF draft probably came out (Was called IP-NG <Next Generation> back then, there was IPv5 too which You can't find in most book today). 

Ever since then, the network engineering community seems to have fallen in love with the newest blue angel. There are probably 100s of books, Video/Classroom trainings,  Podcasts that have been released covering it from all different technical perspectives (Apps., Services, Infra etc.). Everyone of those have been claiming that one should start embracing IPv6 sooner than later or else Your IT would become irrelevant and Your CIO and You will be thrown under the bus. So start now...

To fuel this trend further, they predicted that with IOT (Internet of Things) taking over the world, You will soon run out of time very quickly and not knowing IPv6 will make You irrelevant because of big demand of new IP addresses.  

I in fact came across "WhyNoIPv6" recently which seems to be a fancy protest forum against companies not offering their consumers to connect through IPv6. But why the businesses are yet not keen to put money into it for the most part ?

Imagine you are the virtual CIO of the company and You got to convince Your IT stakeholder about why they should pour some money into this. Just try to answer following questions.

1. What business value does it really add ?

2. What would the implications/opportunity lost, if we don't do this ?

3. Do we know what my business competition is doing about it ?, If Yes - What benefits have they achieved or costs they have saved ?

4. What is the best case vs. worst case scenario for by when our beloved Telcos/CSPs will run out of IPv4 address space in reference to our projected growth and requirements which will impose requirements for more IPv4 addresses. 

5. Throw some $$$ internally or hire an external IPv6 consulting firm, ask them to put together a planning document that covers - IT wide IPv6 readiness, Roadmap, Tentative Cost (Adoption Curve, HW/SW, Licensing, Deployment, Migration, Integrations, Support, Training, Highlighting Current IT Maturity and maybe - The Pitfalls/Lessons Learned by Industry).

BTW... IPv6 does offer some amazing technical benefits as well as has got some amazing new drawbacks/complexities to deal with, which of course You can solve as long as your are committed...fully. Picking up on IPv6 should only take few weeks.

Until then - Trust God, Trust NAT & other stuff which many would tell you are so ugly solutions, and politely ignore such warning:

HTH...

A Tech Artist 🎨