Analysis of enterprise IPv6 readiness

IPv4 is now a legacy protocol and all future growth and innovation on the Internet will occur over IPv6. It is necessary that enterprise organizations take immediate action to develop strategies for IPv6 adoption or risk compromising business agility and continuity - especially those organizations with public-facing content that rely on the Internet. Yet, anecdotal evidence and recent studies indicate that few organizations have taken actionable steps toward IPv6 adoption. The evidence further suggests a low sense of urgency and lack of understanding among IT decision makers of the potential consequences that IPv4 exhaustion will have on their organization´s business model and competitiveness. An understanding of the IPv6 adoption readiness within organizations is needed so that incentives and programs can be put into place to raise the awareness of decision makers to the risks of not having an IPv6 strategy, and to inspire them to take action. This study is a call-to-action and seeks to increase awareness of the current state of IPv6 readiness of enterprise organizations by presenting the results of a multi-phase investigation into the IPv6 readiness and into the quality of IPv6 enablement of U.S. companies. In the first phase of the study, a survey was sent to the senior IT decision makers of 463 end-user enterprise organizations located in the North Carolina eastern region to measure organizational IPv6 readiness across five facets of organizational IPv6 preparedness. Data is presented on the levels of IPv6 readiness of these organizations as well the technological, organizational, and environmental factors associated with IPv6 adoption. In the second phase, the external facing Web services of the 1000 largest U.S. companies were investigated for IPv6 enablement and for IPv6 effectiveness using DNS query tools and a Web-based user experience monitoring platform. The resulting data from these tests is presented along with details for future work.