Standards Development

Scope

The document will present motivations, issues, and potential solutions, for deploying IPv6 in enterprise and industrial (Operational technology) networks

Purpose

Introducing IPv6 in an enterprise environment is probably more complex than in other environments such as Service Provider, home, or IoT. This is because the enterprise is typically a brown field with many applications of any age that were not necessarily designed with IPv6 in mind and must operate seamlessly and continuously during the transition.

 Also, the enterprise networks where legacy applications are operated were probably provisioned with enough IPv4 addresses and connectivity to cover for the near future, leveraging NATs to scale the available external address to the needs of large corporate sites and production lines. In that context, IPv6 may be seen more as a risk than as a benefit.

Apart from large flagship cases, which proved that IPv6 only is effectively achievable, enterprises that make a step towards IPv6 will typically maintain a dual IPv4/IPv6 stack, in which case IPv6 still appears more as a cost center than as value.

On the longer term, though, the lack of IPv6 will become a business disadvantage due to the lack of agility and capabilities that IPv6 brings. Contents and capabilities (such as IoT) may only be available over IPv6; useful features (such as SRv6) cannot be ported, and IPv4 private addresses creates their own problems like when merging networks.

The more IPv6 progresses and deploys, the clearer it becomes that the migration to IPv6 is unavoidable. This document provides information to make the transition smoother, providing hints on both why and how IPv6 could be deployed in a corporate or industrial environment.