How a Pandemic Challenges Your IPv6 Assumptions
Let’s face it, selling IPv6 to most CIOs, let alone everyone who made a career from subnetting the stuff out of IPv4 addresses is difficult. It is almost as painful as convincing people to put money aside for retirement or proactively manage potential downsides in their lives. Our innate inability to plan for worst case scenarios or to form long term strategic plans can easily hide behind a wide range of excuses for avoiding IPv6 adoption. “Things are working fine the way they are”, “We have plenty of IPv4 address space”, “IPv6 has been around for a while so there is no urgency”, “The technology is not ready” … you name it, I likely heard it.
In an organizational culture built on and maintained around constantly putting out fires, the blinders are on and across the leadership structure, people see only what is in front of them. With little to no incentives placed on strategic thinking and risk management, immediate priorities and requirements always win against the bigger picture. A major hurricane might shake things up as Andrew did in Florida, the 100 year floods popping up every few years nowadays might give a hint, in IT however, tenures are short and so are memories. The pandemic on the other hand seems to shake things up a bit.
The pandemic underlines all the systemic issues and rewards all the positives in your business. The pandemic is the great accelerant in that it brings closer the due date on all your business and technology debt (however you want to define that) and speeds up the breakaway opportunities. Your organization will leap forward or fall behind at a faster pace depending on your balance between debt and opportunity. In IT, surveys show, as if we did not already experience it ourselves, that the pandemic was a bigger driver for digital transformation than any other factor. In this context, it might be worthwhile for CIOs to re-examine assumptions, including the assumption related to the need for IPv6. Will CIOs decide to build the digital transformation in the fertile fields of IPv6 or will they remain stubborn and keep plowing the barren IPv4 world?
One interesting example comes to mind: University Campuses. When talking with most university CIOs, the big anti-IPv6 shield is: We have plenty of IPv4 address space. That is true, US universities and the regional Research Education Networks have been generously endowed with IPv4 address space. If we conveniently forget about the skeletons in the closets and the issues created by organic, federated growth, then we can argue that there are few and rather soft reasons for IPv6 adoption in these environment. Many would argue that some IPv6 lipstick on the university webpage would be enough.
What happens when a pandemic empties your campuses and most of your users are now on IPv6 networks which, reluctantly and tenuously, support IPv4 as well? You lost a captive audience confined to your controlled environment. While students will not be plunged into informational darkness, they will notice differences in performance compared to the standards-setting applications they often use in their lives. This will add to a prevailing feeling that University IT is behind the rest of the digital world students were born into. Not a show-stopper but definitely another reminder that change is needed but not happening.
Yes, you can still survive on IPv4 but the question really is: Do you plan to use your Falcon Heavy until it is obsolete or will you start testing your Starship?
