Gaining a Competitive Advantage with IPv6

Businesses must realize that IPv6 provides an opportunity rather than simply being another network infrastructure upgrade.  IPv6 provides organizations with a significant competitive advantage.  As enterprises develop their business case for IPv6 they should consider the advantages they could achieve.

 

The Significance of IPv6

IPv6 has surpassed IPv4 to become the most popular Internet Protocol.  IPv6 is used extensively across the Internet, and there are over 35 countries where IPv6 is used more than IPv4.  If whole countries are already far along with their migration, then corporations should be maintaining this pace to facilitate connectivity to their customers.

There is a sense of urgency and realization of the significance of the global transition to IPv6.  IPv6 is now used by over two billion Internet-connected devices.  However, that is not the case in private corporate networks that are struggling to modernize and solely rely on IPv4.

Enterprises must prepare and develop agility to respond to government or industry IPv6 requirements.  Using IPv6 allows the company to expand into markets and communicate directly with customers globally with varied connectivity characteristics.

 

Keep Pace with the Competition

The Internet has been moving to IPv6 over the past decade as the evolution of the Internet continues.  Enterprises should maintain pace with this global modernization of the Internet.  However, many enterprises intentionally or unintentionally avoid and ignore IPv6 and further compress their deployment timelines.  At this point, enterprises are in the late-majority phase and are in danger of being in the laggard’s category if they continue to ignore IPv6.  Instead, enterprises should understanding the timing of IPv6 and proactively develop a strategy to move forward.

There is a fear of being left behind by the competition as organizations try to keep up with their peers.  At the same time, those new to IPv6 have a fear of this unknown protocol they are unfamiliar with.  Many enterprise IT staff do not yet know what IPv6 is and how it is different than IPv4.  Most people in enterprise IT departments either fear IPv6 or haven’t given much thought to IPv6.  Organizations are encouraged to build an IPv6 training plan to get past this obstacle.  Enterprises can develop their own internal IPv6 training plan or individuals can learn IPv6 and advance their careers themselves.

 

IPv6 as an Enabler for Innovation and Growth

Enterprises are connecting more devices, applications, and services to their networks than ever before.  The convergence of mobile, IOT, industrial automation, cloud, edge compute, and AI adoption are driving greater scale of IT environments.  Each of these new services require connectivity which requires unique addresses.

This is virtually impossible to achieve with IPv4 due to its limited address space, address overlaps, and the requirement for Network Address Translation (NAT).  Most enterprises have a limited supply of globally-unique public IPv4 addresses and struggle with scarcity of often overlapping private RFC1918 addresses.  This becomes painfully apparent when companies merge their networks or try to expand into cloud infrastructure.

NAT is used extensively and creates operational complexities which perpetuates a lack of security awareness of the network environment.  Cloud environments frequently use overlapping private IPv4 addresses.  This limits cloud expansion and application modernization because IPv4 addresses are only “locally significant” within each cloud “bubble”.

IPv6 removes obstacles, barriers, constraints and limitations of IPv4.  Companies should leverage IPv6’s abundance of globally-unique addresses to launch an innovation at large scale faster and at lower cost.  IPv6 allows for a consistent address model across sites and offers greater flexibility and scalability to expand environments as requirements change.  IPv6 facilitates digital transformation and growth as there are no boundaries or limitations with its scale of addressing space.

There are opportunities to gain a competitive advantage with IPv6.  With modernization of IT infrastructure comes power from leveraging the benefits of this protocol.  IPv6 facilitates growth and its astounding abundance of globally-unique addresses opens many doors for innovation.  IPv6 also offers greater efficiency on network segments.

 

Reduce Costs with IPv6

Organizations don’t realize that operating an IPv4-only environment has significant costs.  Businesses often fail to quantify these hidden costs of IPv4.  Obtaining public IPv4 addresses on the open market used to be an expensive proposition.  Several years ago, public IPv4 addresses were going for $50 each.  Now that much of the easily transferable larger blocks of good-reputation IPv4 addresses have been acquired by large cloud providers, the price has dropped to $20 an address.  You can get addresses, but the blocks are small and could have poor reputation.

IPv6 lends itself to software-driven configuration, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) whereby IPv6 addresses can easily be assigned programmatically.  With IPv4, the address space is heavily fragmented so it isn’t easy to find an unassigned block.  Therefore, a human in the DDI team must interrupt the automation tasks to find the required IPv4 subnet based on the number of end-nodes.  With IPv6, the software automation simply takes the next extremely large prefix from the list and continues its software configuration tasks, without any human intervention.  IPv6 reduces manual configuration and thus saves operational costs.

This provides greater operational efficiency by developing an IPv6 address plan that is simple and focuses on ease of use rather than scarcity.  IPv6 addressing architecture simplicity permits greater levels of automation which then improves consistency and improves expansion.  This consistency makes security, compliance, and operations easier.  All of this leads to greater operational cost savings.  IPv6 gives enterprises far more flexibility to manage long-term infrastructure costs and reduces costs and risks of public and private IPv4 address scarcity.

IPv6 can save operational costs as organization more systems to IPv6-only.  Once you move to IPv6-only it completely removes the need for IPv4.  This reduction in OPEX costs, saves money for other initiatives that drive innovation and revenue.

 

Better Performing IT Infrastructure

IPv6 is now used by the most popular websites.  Statistics show that the more popular a website is, the more likely it is to be using IPv6.  Organizations that want their websites reached by more customers should use IPv6 transport.  IPv6 has been shown to be faster on average than IPv4 across the Internet.  This is due to how IPv6 routes packets directly to a destination and avoids the use of NAT.

Companies should adopt IPv6 before their competitors if they want to have an edge.  They would want to make their website faster than their competitor’s by enabling IPv6 on their web applications.  Companies should perform an analysis and prioritize IPv6 enablement to take advantage of this performance improvement.

 

Mitigate IPv6 Security Risks

Enterprises should understand the security implications of IPv6 as there are risks for organizations that ignore them.  Many enterprise security teams are unaware of how IPv6 is used extensively on employee and customer mobile devices.  IPv6 is just software and software has vulnerabilities.  IPv6 is already running on every computer/laptop/server in the entire enterprise network.  This situation creates a “latent threat” risk to all organizations that have not yet created an IPv6 security strategy, including potential competitors.

Instead, security teams should proactively create a comprehensive security plan that yields a better company security posture.  Cybersecurity teams should be aware of IPv6 usage internally and externally.  Security teams should make sure their security products and services provide discovery and visibility and facilitate policy enforcement.

IPv6 can also reduce cybersecurity risks by increasing situational awareness and improved authenticity of addresses.  IPv6 can also enhance zero-trust network architectures.  Enterprises that proactively secure IPv6 can reduce protocol-related security blind spots and improve the effectiveness of their wholistic cybersecurity program.  Running IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously may increase the attack surface and require security teams to secure both protocols.  However, running only IPv6 reduces your attack surface.

 

Summary

IPv6 doesn’t automatically release these benefits to the business magically.  It does require effort on the part of the enterprise to develop a plan and implement IPv6.  The following table shows a summary of how IPv6 facilitates the business outcomes which lead to a competitive advantage.

 

Business Outcome	IPv6 Facilitates	Potential IPv6 Competitive Advantage
Growth & Expansion	Scalable connectivity for new digital services	Faster expansion of connected products and services
Cost Savings	Reduces reliance on scarce IPv4 address resources	Lower long-term IPv4-related operational costs
Cybersecurity	Improves IPv6 visibility and policy consistency	Fewer protocol-related security blind spots
IT Modernization	Enables additional addressing and deployment options	Greater flexibility of application architectures
Innovation	Supports large-scale AI, IoT and cloud computing	Easier expansion of connected services
Operational Efficiency	Standardizes addressing and automate provisioning	More consistent and scalable network operations
Market Readiness	Connects IPv6-capable customers and partners	Fewer technical barriers to new opportunities

 

Continuing to operate IPv4-only networks increases operational costs, and the limitations of using them will increase in the coming years.  Enterprises lack public and private IPv4 address resources to operate their networks indefinitely.  Enterprises should stop avoiding IPv6, lean into enabling it, unlock business opportunities, save costs, reduce technology risks, and use it as a competitive advantage.