In January, Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra will begin meeting with agency CIOs to check on progress in implementing a September OMB mandate to use native IPv6 in public facing websites by the end of fiscal 2012. 

The meetings will be based on agency assessments begun by the Federal CIO Council's IPv6 Task Force in December, said task force chairman Peter Tseronis Dec. 16, at a lunch hosted by the Association for Federal Information Resource Management, in Washington, D.C.

Some agencies have made no further IPv6 progress since the last deadline in 2008, which required agencies to be capable of handling IPv6 traffic. Knowing Kundra is a strong proponent of tracking through public dashboards, there will be a measurement component to agency IPv6 plans, said Tseronis.

On Dec. 9, the Office of Management and Budget announced a 25-point implementation plan for restructuring federal IT. The plan might have been an appropriate vehicle for bringing agencies' deficient IPv6 transition plans to light, Tseronis said, adding that he would have liked to see IPv6 emphasized, or even mentioned, in OMB's 25-point IT plan.

"Vivek agreed that while nothing in his 25-point federal transformation message last week says 'v6 is the priority'--I said to him, 'I'd like to hear a little bit more about v6 coming out of the EOP,' but just stressing the fact that none of those 25 points happen without our infrastructure being v6-enabled. And he totally agrees."

"It's not sexy enough to say 'I want to fix my infrastructure,' but you want to talk about cloud-ready or cloud-first policies. You want to talk about pilots and leveraging Web 2.0 and social media. All that is dependent on Internet infrastructure," he added.

The slow transition can be partially attributed to the fact that, prior to the September memo, some agencies weren't authorized to transition to IPv6, said John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers. Now that they have the green light, they will be asked to move fast. The memo requires to upgrade internal client applications that communicate with the public Internet to use native IPv6 by 2014.

Only 2.73 percent of the IPv4 addresses space remains available as of Dec. 16, said Curran, and by his prediction, on Feb. 20, 2011, new addresses will run out.

For more:
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