IPv6 needed to cope with swelling cloud computing sector

Thursday, June 09, 2011

The rapid proliferation of new computing technologies - and devices designed to take advantage of them - has heightened the need for rapid adoption of IPv6 protocol, according to the backers of World IPv6 Day.

The final batch of IPv4 addresses was allocated in February of this year, meaning that the countdown is progressing toward the end of that system. Thankfully, yesterday's test of IPv6 - during which many of the biggest presences on the internet changed over to the new protocol - failed to produce any catastrophic outages.

It is important to recognize the transition cannot be handled in a hasty and piecemeal fashion," said the Neustar company's advanced technology group vice president, Tom McGarry.

Companies that investigate new technologies, like IPv6 and cloud computing, ahead of their rivals could gain a significant competitive advantage, according to experts. Both new systems will continue to play critical roles in business IT for the foreseeable future.