Why Do You Need IPv6?

How often have you heard one of these phrases?

• “It’s on our radar.”
• ”It’s in our 5 year plan.”
• ”We’ll think about it.”
• ”It’s too complicated.”
• “It’s not cost-effective.”
• ”We just don’t see the benefit.”

Perhaps more. Of course, I’m talking about IPv6 adoption in a company environment. An IT administrator might make a suggestion. Or it might be from a tech-forward managed IT firm. But it feels like the harder you push, the further away you seem from getting your company to actually adopt it.

What is IPv6?

Simply put, IPv6 is the addressing scheme which was put in place by internet registries to alleviate the problem of IP address exhaustion on the internet. IP addresses, as most people know them, are a 4-octet address where the numbers are separated by periods (the . character). One that you may perhaps be familiar with is 192.168.1.1. This is a common address for home internet routers.

The issue at hand is that almost all of the routable IP addresses available have been allocated or taken. In the 1980’s, DARPA and the DoD (Department of Defense) had no idea that their brainchild would one day be in use worldwide. IP addresses were used for military communication.

In 2026, there are billions of internet-connected devices in use worldwide. And—you guessed it, each one uses an IP address, whether it is a private address that has been translated into a publicly routable address, or a server that uses its own publicly routable address.

An IPv6 address reads like 2001:4860:4860:0000:0000:0000:0000:8888 (that’s the IPv6 address for one of Google’s public DNS servers). As you may see, that’s a long address. 128 bits to be exact. An IPv4 address, by contrast, is only 32 bits. This means that there are exponentially more IPv6 addresses available for use than IPv4, and every single one is designed to be publicly routable, with some exceptions.

Why Should I Be Worried?

IPv4 addresses are, as you now know, in very limited supply. Many international internet service providers (ISPs) are transitioning from IPv4 or IPv4/IPv6 (known as dual-stack IP addressing) to IPv6-only. When IPv4 addresses become completely exhausted, no new publicly routable IPv4 addresses will be issued. In 2011, the 5 international Regional Internet Registries, or RIRs, reported that they had either completely run out of IPv4 addresses or were heavily rationing the few that had been returned to them.

RIRs are the regional governing bodies for IP address assignment. They are ARIN (America), RIPE NCC (Europe), APNIC (Asia-Pacific), LACNIC (Latin America), and AFRNIC (Africa). Companies began to adapt to exhaustion by using technologies like Network Address Translation (NAT) which translates a publicly-routable IP address like 99.127.147.116 (this server’s internet IPv4 address) into a private IP address, such as 192.168.1.11. While this is a workable stop-gap for now, as more servers come online and require public-facing access, this solution will cease to be workable and companies will be forced to transition, whether they want to or not.

Think of an IP address a lot like a phone number. As more people move into an area, phone numbers become more scarce for each person who signs up for phone service in that area. When one area code fills up, the telephone company can either re-allocate canceled numbers, or move newly created phone numbers into a new area code. The same is true for IP addresses, except all of the possible area codes are already full. IPv6 adoption is fast becoming a necessity.

A Tricky Implementation

Since IPv6 addresses are meant to be publicly routable, transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6 proper comes with its own set of challenges. Any servers that are not meant to be publicly accessible must be properly firewalled to block incoming traffic, while still allowing for certain ICMP (network control protocol) messages to come through. Otherwise, network administrators risk blocking out traffic that is vital for IPv6 connectivity. Deep packet inspection is a must for internet-facing servers.

Static IPv6 addresses should be used for anything that needs to be accessed from the internet. This presents a challenge due to the fact that IPv6 was designed for mostly dynamic addressing. Static addresses, as the name implies, are addresses that don’t ever change. Think of your home address. Unless you move, it doesn’t change. Dynamic addressing, however, allows IP addresses to change at each lease renewal if there are other addresses available. With IPv6, there are roughly 3.4 x 10³⁸ addresses available. That’s over 666 billion addresses per square millimeter of the Earth’s surface. That’s a LOT of addresses.

Many Challenges…

One challenge lies in keeping an IPv6 address static. Some operating systems simply aren’t setup by default for static assignment of them. This means that Windows administrators have to perform some tricky command-line actions simply to set up a static IIS web server on IPv6. It takes time, and when one can just throw an IPv4 address and map a port via NAT, it doesn’t make sense to do the extra work.

Another challenge is that enterprise networking equipment has only recently begun to support the IPv6 protocol fully. Even at that, depending on the implementation, network administrators need to use two sets of rules for firewalls–one for IPv4 and one for IPv6, if they plan to run a dual-stack (most common) configuration.

The next challenge is compatibility. Because IPv4 is not compatible with IPv6, it is impossible to access an IPv6-only website from an IPv4-only address and vice-versa, unless the user is using an IPv6 proxy to translate between the addressing schemes. Since every major US ISP is still using IPv4, it makes no sense to a CEO or IT manager to capture traffic from new technology, set up 2 sets of firewall rules, and potentially expose their systems to yet-another attack surface, unless there is significant demand. Most people just can’t tell the difference.

Poor Adoption (or, none at all…)

The final challenge is adoption. As of 2026, it is estimated that only 50% to 60% of user-generated traffic in the United States comes from IPv6 capable networks. While all of the major internet service providers (ISPs) have IPv6 implementations in their networks, smaller regional and local ISP networks often haven’t fully adopted IPv6. And some companies are still using older equipment that doesn’t even support it.

Because a certain major ISP assigns several IPv6 addressing blocks in segments that must be requested individually by the edge router in order to assign them (again, not naming names), business-grade equipment cannot be made to segment IPv6 networks beyond one level of separation for these connections. This is an issue for larger businesses, where system admins have implemented network segments for each connected system as part of a larger zero-trust program.

Many Solutions

In order to address the challenges faced by potential IPv6 converts, ISPs, equipment manufacturers, companies and IT administrators have to work together. Equipment manufacturers and ISPs need to improve their implementations and adoption of the IPv6 protocol in both equipment and networks. Companies need to demand ISPs come up with a solution that allows micro-segmentation of IPv6 networks for zero-trust compatibility. Finally, IT administrators and managed IT firms need to be able to make implementation cost-effective for their companies.

When will more companies adopt IPv6? It’s simple. When they are forced to. When major ISPs begin to go “IPv6-only”, everyone will be forced to adapt, or lose connectivity that is vital to their business. And that, honestly, may not be too far off.

What Can You Do?

If you are reading this article as a tech-forward company, you might be wondering what you can do to really make a difference. It’s really very, very simple. Plan on adding IPv6 to your edge within the next year. Implement it at the edge first, making sure to add robust firewall rules to ensure that unauthorized traffic can’t get through, while allowing authorized traffic to pass in and out. An experienced IT administrator can get you there. Your company’s edge consists of all of your internet-facing services, that is, your web servers, VPN concentrators and load balancers.

If your equipment doesn’t support IPv6, see if there is a firmware upgrade available to support it. If there isn’t, allocate some of your IT budget toward upgrading your edge equipment to IPv6 capable devices.

Using this edge-first approach allows you to implement dual-stack IPv6 on internet-facing servers, while keeping your critical data-center infrastructure safely humming along on IPv4-only for now. Users who are transitioning to IPv6 only will be able to access your website and VPN services. Your infrastructure will remain safely tucked away. Then, if the edge transition is successful, begin to think about transitioning your internal clients so that they can use IPv6 services, again using robust firewall rules to protect your internal networks.

Should I Leave Out The Data Center?

Your data center should be the last thing you transition. The data center is the real asset that hackers want to get at. Any transition to IPv6 should be done very carefully and only after intensively assessing whether a transition is proper or even necessary. In most cases, this should only be done if necessary to keep a government contract or other business-essential need.

This approach, if planned and carried out properly, has served many previously IPv4-only companies very well. Remember, life is not a race, but a marathon. The same goes for your business.

Conclusion

IPv6 implementation is possible, even if you are a huge conglomerate company currently running only IPv4. It takes careful planning, consideration, planning, preparation, and implementation. Data center transitions are unlikely to be necessary, and an edge-first approach should likely be followed instead. Don’t put it in your 5 year plan. Start now. Remember that the most successful businesses adapt to changing market conditions, while others get left behind. IPv6 isn’t just coming, it’s already here. That way, you’ll be ready when IPv6-only begins to happen, even if your competitors aren’t.