Warning to enterprises: Actively deploy IPv6

Enterprises have the resources and the expertise; they may not realize it yet, but it turns out that most enterprises have not yet deployed IPv6.

That's the conclusion of the Internet Society's latest report on the deployment of IPv6, five years after the global push to deploy the new addressing protocol began.

According to analysis data provided by Amazon.com, only 13% of the top one million websites are using IPv6 traffic, while this figure rises to 22% of the top 1,000 websites.

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In 37 countries, only 5% of Internet traffic is using IPv6, according to Google's estimates, which are based on traffic from its load balancers.

In India, the figure is over 20%, mainly thanks to mobile network operator Reliance JIO, which uses native IPv6 traffic in its LTE network, which accounts for 70% of total IPv6 traffic in India.

One area where IPv6 is being deployed on a large scale is the Internet of Things. Internet Society consultant Fred Baker said: "The standard for the Internet of Things is based on IPv6."

"Where IPv6 is less deployed is in the enterprise network," Baker said. "Residential networks are well on their way to IPv6, and mobile networks are approaching 100 percent IPv6 utilization, or heading that way."

The barrier to IPv6 deployment in the enterprise is the installed base.

"They've been running IPv4 for 20, 30, 40 years, and they tend to think, if it doesn't have problems, why fix it? It doesn't solve the problems they have, so they see no reason to pay the price."

But moving to IPv6 can solve some problems for businesses, whether they realize it or not.

One of them is network performance. Facebook has found that, on average, IPv6 is 15% faster than IPv4, and according to the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), IPv6 appears to mostly have better performance.

As IPv6 deployment increases, we are approaching the point where IPv4 traffic is being carried over IPv6 instead of the other way around. The performance benefits of IPv6 will only increase.

Another is the return on investment for IPv4 addresses, which are now worth about $10 each and will increase as IPv4 reaches its peak.

Enterprises that move to IPv6 before peak growth can cover some of the migration costs by selling their IPv4 addresses.

"A company with a Class B address can now sell it for $640,000, and those addresses were common in the past," Baker said.

If an enterprise has more hosts than IPv4 addresses, it must consider tricks such as NAT (Network Address Translation) to share them. Of greatest interest here are Internet Service Providers (ISPs), who may face additional legal restrictions requiring them to be able to tell law enforcement which IP address a user is using at a given time.

Moving to IPv6 will eliminate the need for the network layer for logging.

This is not to say that migrating to IPv6 is a simple matter; enterprises need to deploy it step by step.

"The first thing they have to do is think about what hardware, what software and what applications do they need to deploy IPv6?" Baker said.

They may find that they need to replace some aging equipment, which is a budget issue.

Baker, who previously worked at Cisco, said they once spent a year talking to customers about IPv6 deployment before getting into the budget cycle.

Older network equipment most likely needs to be replaced, and it may have caused all sorts of headaches for network administrators, so administrators may want to take advantage of the opportunity to replace it. This in itself may be enough to push a company to migrate to IPv6.

When looking for new IPv6-enabled equipment and services, Baker recommends looking at vendors you've purchased equipment from before; they may have upgraded their products.

Mat Ford, technical program manager at the Internet Society, warned against taking "no" for an answer.

"If a vendor tells you, 'We don't have any customers asking for this,' you can say, 'I'm curious, there are a lot of people doing IPv6 deployments now, maybe I should ask them what they're using and then buy their product,'" he said.

Those enterprises that migrate to IPv6 rarely migrate everything at once.

"They'll start with the customer-facing interfaces first: email, web, etc," Baker said.

Adding IPv6 addresses to existing IPv4 services is typically done through a hosting provider, and enterprises do not need to take the next step and turn on IPv6 internally until there is a need for other applications or network deployments to be performed internally.

Typically, companies finally decide to turn off IPv4 addresses when they realize they are effectively running two networks.

Microsoft recently concluded that IPv4 is causing a lot of problems and that the dual stack is even more troublesome.

Enterprises should consider deploying IPv6 at their own pace. Analysts at network operator Swisscom believe that by 2019, a large portion of its customer base will support IPv6.

By 2024, IPv4 will become very rare.