IPv6 is on your front burner

Federal agencies already met a June 30, 2008 deadline to be ready to upgrade their network backbones to support IPv6, according to the Office of Management and Budget. But agencies are still a long way from plugging into an expanded Internet, one which is urgently needed because IPv4's 4.3 billion addresses are expected to run out just next year.

There are still plenty of bumps in the road, according to a Federal Computer Week analysis. Here are a few of them:

• Finding the right IPv6-capable products that will work alongside existing technology.
• Implementing an address management system.
• Preventing unauthorized or uncontrolled deployments of the new protocol.

The Defense Information Systems Agency has been monitoring this issue closely and has moved more quickly than most civilian agencies to build solid IPv6 networks, according to this article. There are plenty of problems, according to Gerald Doyle, chief of DISA's Systems Engineering Center. "The availability and the number of products that exist in this [new] category are not nearly the number that they are in IPv4," Doyle told FCW. "Part of the problem is that some aspects of the standard are still moving targets. "Not everything has been absolutely nailed down."

And IT professionals must have confidence in new products before they put them online. "The biggest thing is for [chief information officers] to have some level of assurance that the things they're putting on their networks have been plugged in before someplace else," Tim Winters, IPv6 manager at the University of New Hampshire's interoperability testing lab, told FCW.

The European Union is much farther ahead of the United States in implementing IPv6 and so is China. So it may be time to take some lessons from other countries on how to grow the Internet and not impede it. It is an issue that CIOs at every federal agency will have to deal with in the next few months, and it will require critical thinking and a united front to make it happen. - Judi