Part of information risk management includes capacity planning: controlling the risk of outages, instability, or degraded service due to inadequate planning for future needs.

Articles published last month were a wake up call for organizations that don’t have a strategic plan in place for how they intend to migrate to Internet Protocol version 6, or as it’s more commonly known, IPv6. Without a plan, there’s a risk of network instability as the change from IPv4 to IPv6 occurs. And that date is now getting closer.

In Apr, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued the report “Internet Addressing: Measuring Deployment of IPv6,” noting that as of Mar, 2010, only 8% of the available 4 billion IPv4 addresses are still unallocated.

To help put that into context, INTEC Systems Institute created the “IPv4 Exhaustion Counter” (shown to the left). Based on the rate of address allocation requests, the counter dynamically displays the date when the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) will run out of IPv4 addresses, estimated to be sometime in Sep, 2011. At that point, the Regional Internet Registries will continue to allocate addresses from their “inventory”, which is estimated to be exhausted by Apr, 2012.

Although the OECD report is fascinating reading—it’s too detailed for most non-technical managers. Fortunately, there have been recent articles that put the report into perspective that businesses can understand.

Carolyn Duffy Marsan’s article “Reasons for supporting IPv6 continue to pile up” in Network World discusses the practical implications: “only 5.5% of the world’s addressable IP networks can handle traffic over IPv6.” And although some major website operators, such as Google and Netflix, are adopting IPv6, only 1.45% of the world’s 1,000 most visited websites presently support IPv6.

In ComputerWorld, Robert L. Mitchell interviewed John Curran, the president of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). One question addressed a crucial issue: “Sounds like an ISP problem. Why should businesses care?” The answer is nuanced. Through transition mechanisms called “translation” or “tunneling,”  it should be possible for your IPv4 customers to connect to your IPv4 website after the switch to IPv6—assuming the translation and tunneling are properly configured. The deciding factor may come down to performance: all the new growth and developments will be happening on the IPv6 part of the Internet. Who wants to be left sitting in a slower moving “Internet backwater?”

Curran also reminds us that all the major operating systems, routers, and firewalls already support IPv6. The challenge will be configuring and enabling what already exists. Another interesting question is what other infrastructure may need to be changed: for example, most help desk software understands an IPv4 address (192.168.23.142), but may need to be changed to understand an IPv6 address (3ffe:0501:0008:0000:0260:97ff:fe40:efab).

For organizations the need help creating a migration plan, IPv6 Act Now can provide valuable assistance. For enterprises, they suggest six points to consider:

1. -Check that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can fill your IPv6 requirements
   

2. -Organize IPv6 connectivity and address space
   

3. -Carry out a hardware and software audit to determine the compatibility of existing technologies with IPv6
   

4. -Configure your routers, other hardware, operating systems and applications before IPv4 addresses run out
   

5. -Train staff to deploy and manage IPv6
   

6. -Rewrite any of your own applications that store IP addresses to be IPv6 compatible
   

A final point from IPv6 Act Now: “the longer a business waits to adopt IPv6, the more expensive it will be.”

—Jim Herbeck