IPv6 Training From The CIO down

IPv6 Information, Training and Audit

Welcome to Ipsilon Consulting. You've decided it's time for action on IPv6, and you need help getting started. You've come to the right place. Let's start fast:

• You yourself need to cut through the FUD and learn what it means for your company.
• You need high level knowledge of IPv6
• You need to be able to break the problem down:
  • Will customers need to connect to you over IPv6?
  • Will you need to talk to business partners over IPv6?
  • Will your own network expansion or VPN be constrained until you can include IPv6?
  • Can you realise cost savings on VoIP or VPN by adopting IPv6?
  • Do you have any compliance requirements for IPv6?
  • When will these issues become pertinent, and are you considering IPv6 capability in your hardware purchase and renewal cycle?
• Free generic advice: Most experts agree that roll-out should be on your main production network:
  • That means a long, slow, careful roll-out
  • It doesn't mean all features on day 1. Start with connectivity, firewall and a web-proxy.
  • Our experts and training will give you the pros and cons, but IPv6 is for the long term. It's not a side project.
  • A roll-out on your production network requires thorough training of all network staff.
  • Everyone will need to convert and learn over time. Ten years from now, IPv6 will be the Internet. One year from now, you could experience pain points if you haven't begun to deploy.

Take Your First Action Right Now

1. Bookmark this page.
2. Questions? Talk to a consultant NOW - see the contact box on the left.
3. Choose: Work in-house, or start with an Ipsilon Consulting 2-day audit.
   • In-House: Start with training for yourself [class synopses, schedules and booking]. Your time is valuable; it's worth paying an expert to help you get up to speed. During training, you will identify the beginnings of a plan for your company, including priorities, timelines, budgets, cost-benefits and when to engage the various departments in IT.
   • Audit: Start with an on-site audit to gather unbiased information on staff, architecture and hardware readiness information, plus a realistic assessment of business need and timelines. IPv6 can't be outsourced as a black box, because it will eventually touch every machine you own - but it is a project that can be led efficiently and effectively by consultants. Ipsilon Consulting can provide pure advice, or complete programme management. And after ten years of people "crying wolf" on IPv6, it could be that an independent report is what you need to cut through scepticism and kick-start your project.
4. Book your training class (see left) or talk to us about an audit (contact info on the left, again)

Need More Information First?

If you're still at the "convince me" stage about IPv6, then keep reading.

Fact #1: You can wait a little longer and delay starting your project. It will cost you more if you do, because IPv6 will become a reality for everyone within the lifetime of any network hardware that you purchase today. If it's not capable, or requires firmware upgrades, that will cost you money down the line.

IPv4 is not just running out, it's accelerating into a wall

The old Internet addresses have been eked out for much longer than expected, but all the tricks are now spent. There is no new method coming along to save us. There is a finite pool of IPv4 addresses left, and the burn rate of those addresses is actually increasing. There is nothing that can stop us running out. The counter on the right of this page shows the number of days until the central global registry runs out, and gives its last allocation to the three regional (continental) registries. While the numbers are dynamic, it's looking like around 1-Jun-2011. Each of those regional registries will then allocate them to local ISPs and so on, so there will be maybe another 90 days before final exhaustion. However, when the counter at right runs down, you can be certain that it will be big news and it will cause a rush.

IPv6 does everything slightly differently

It's not hard, it's just different. In order to get it right first time, everyone will need training. Without that, people will assume that it's business as usual, but with longer addresses. IPv6 best practise differs from IPv4, in security, in NAT, in name service, in VPNs, in dual-homing, in resilience, in proxying and in load balancing. The powers that be decided that it was the opportunity to fix many long-standing issues with IP. Your existing networks will need to run both IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel, so IPv6 could usefully have been part of every architectural decision since around 2009. Right now, every decision made without full understanding is probably costing you money.

There is no alternative

There have been a lot of very knowledgeable and capable network engineers saying exactly what management wanted to hear: apparently pragmatic advice that NAT, RFC1918, VPNs and a host of other technologies meant that IPv6 could be safely ignored. That has been true in the past, but not so any more. The Internet depends on a central addressing scheme, and IPv6 is the only game in town. The committee that created it was disbanded four years ago; the standard has been considered complete since that time.

You have to move to stay where you are

It is true that a company can continue to operate all the same systems in all the same ways as before. However, there will come a point, depending on where your business is and what it does, where that stops being tenable. It may be that mobile access to your services is important to your customers; SmartPhones will become IPv6 dependent before many other browsers. It may be that you need to provide your website over IPv6 to Asia - the first region likely to be IPv6 only. It may be that you need to grow the number of servers that people can connect to, but new IPv4 addressing is expensive or unavailable. It may be that you start losing out because you can't deploy killer IPv6 technologies like cloud VoIP, as they become prevalent. It could be that you need to open small remote offices, or teleworking, and running a VPN over IPv4 starts to become prohibitively expensive compared to IPv6. If you need to determine the potential pain points for your company, an Ipsilon Consulting audit may be the best way to start your programme.

Call to action!

Don't leave this page without taking positive action. We at Ipsilon Consulting are genuinely worried about British companies failing to be ready, and we want to help. Our consultants have been involved with the 'net since 1993, since before security was needed, before Y2K, before the current name service was used in the UK, before Linux, before Windows had an IP stack and before email left your own enterprise. The Internet has grown from a toy, to a business critical service, to changing whole business models and pricing structures, and our way of life. We've seen and helped companies through all these challenges, and none of them were as big as IPv6. Use the chat box at left, send an email or give us a call.

Phone

+44 843 289 1251

Fax

+44 7092 251403

Email