If you're a vendor that sells network equipment to the public sector or a business where the web is essential to your daily operations, you better make sure that you have some kind of IPv6 address migration in place. Sadly you probably don't: Verizon Business' independent testing arm ICSA Labs reveals that close to half of the vendors that sell IT gear to the public sector vertical won't be able to meet a July 1, 2010 IPv6 compliance deadline.
Many businesses also don't have an IPv6 transition in place to deal with the impending crisis of when IPv4 addresses exhaust that ICSA and American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) predict will happen in 2011. Meeting IPv6 compliance is a multistep process that requires meeting compliance elements set by both the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
"There have been products out that have been IPv6-ready or have been working with IPv6 for a while," said Guy Snyder, secure communications program manager for the ICSA Labs. "But a lot of vendors haven't modified their product to work against the IPv6 profile that NIST wrote."
But meeting IPv6 compliance is not just about the telecom network alone. The computers, fax machines and modems that connect to the network will also need to be IPv6 compliant.
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- Light Reading has this article
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