August 2, 2019

Why Organizations are Still Hesitant in Deciding between IPv4 and IPv6

The internet is now facing a split: experts say we are getting into a foreseeable future where it has a couple of sets of underlying IPs. Of course, we are referring to Internet Protocol Version 4 and Version 6.

This is as per a new study on the internet, published recently. One of the key findings of this study is that the adoption of IPv6 internationally is not moving at a quick pace. Of the 215 global economies measured, only 12% or 26 had IPv6 capability levels which were steadily increasing over the 36-month study period.

This study found that the incentive for small business networks to switch to IPv6 is very little, because these networks do not have to develop at the very same pace as bigger enterprise networks have to. In the years to come, these small business networks will be stuck in a slower-moving hardware and software ecosystem tied to IPv4.

Organizations have been slow in moving to IPv6 for many reasons, including not requiring vast amounts of fresh IPs; the deployment expense that comes with switching to IPv6 is a consideration too. When it comes to cost, the issue is not getting an IPv6 IP, since these are abundantly available at a cheap price, but it is the initiation as well as maintenance which needs investment.

This study also found that there exists a robust secondary IPv4 marketplace, noting that the price of an address rose from $8.0 in 2014 to $17.0 in 2018. Companies which hold onto used IPv4 addresses now have an increasing incentive to trade them on, thereby alleviating a scarcity issue which could also drive IPv6 adoption.

Several players in the internet service provider industry are conscious of not just the issues but also the pressing need to act. However, provided that there are technical ways to deal with the IPv4 addressing scarcity, like creating gateways having shared IPv4 for many connected devices, in addition to zero regulatory mandates to switch to IPv6 in a rapid way, the move to it will be slowed.

Enterprises that deploy IoT devices or mobile internet services opt for IPv6 and slowly divert traffic from IPv4-protocoled internet. One notable issue is IPv4- and IPv6-only hosts cannot interact with one another if there is no intermediate gateway to facilitate that.

IPv4 network deployments depend a lot on perimeter security, in addition to NAT private networks. The implementation of IPv6 network differs from this considerably and virtually forces companies to think about the deployment of zero trust architecture, which is a huge mind shift. The adoption of zero-trust network is seemingly the reason why IPv6 adoption has been slow.