What Should an Engineer Address when 'Selling' IPv6 to Executives?

Wed Mar 6 03:15:20 UTC 2013

On Mar 5, 2013, at 6:46 PM, Mukom Akong T. <mukom.tamon at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 12:34 AM, Mike. <the.lists at mgm51.com> wrote:
> 
>> I would lean towards
>> 
>>  f) Cost/benefit of deploying IPv6.
>> 
> 
> I certainly agree, which is why I propose understanding you organisation's
> business model and how specifically v4 exhaustion will threaten that. IPv6
> is the cast as a solution to that, plus future unknown benefits that may
> result from e-2-e and NAT elimination.
> 
> I have no clue how to sell 'benefit' of IPv6 in isolation as right now even
> for engineers, there's not much of a benefit except more address space.

I'm not so sure about that…

Admittedly, most of these are too technical to be suitable for management consumption, but:

	1.	Decreased application complexity:
			Because we will be able to get rid of all that NAT traversal code,
			we get the following benefits:

			I.	Improved security
				A.	Fewer code paths to test
				B.	Lower complexity = less opportunity to introduce flaws
			II.	Lower cost
				A.	Less developer man hours maintaining (or developing) NAT traversal code
				B.	Less QA time spent testing NAT traversal code
				C.	No longer need to keep the lab stocked with every NAT implementation ever invented
				D.	Fewer calls to support for failures in product's NAT traversal code
	2.	Increased transparency:
			Because addressing is now end-to-end transparent, we gain a
			number of benefits:

			I.	Improved Security
				A.	Harder for attackers to hide in anonymous address space.
				B.	Easier to track down spoofing
				C.	Simplified log correlation
				D.	Easier to identify source/target of attacks
			II.	Simplified troubleshooting
				A.	No more need to include state table dumps in troubleshooting
				B.	tcpdump inside and tcpdump outside contain the same packets.

Finally… There are 7 billion people on the planet. There are 2 billion currently on the internet.

The other 5 billion won't fit in IPv4. If you want to talk to them, you'll need IPv6.

It doesn't matter how many IPv4 addresses you have. What matters is how many people/places/things you want to reach or you want to be reachable from that don't have any. Today, that's a small number, but it's growing. The growth in that number will only accelerate in the coming years.

Today, the IPv6 internet is this big: .  Today, the IPv4 internet is this big: o
In a few years, the IPv4 internet will still be this big: o and the IPv6 internet will be more like this: OOOOO

(Size comparison should be relatively accurate at any font size as long as you use the same font and font size for the whole thing.)

Owen