Way to go, vendors of low-end routers and intrusion detection and prevention systems—you’re a stumbling block on Bechtel’s path to the next-generation Internet.
“We’re doing [both IPv4 and the next-generation IPv6 networks], and we anticipate doing both for a number of years,” said Fred Wettling, a Bechtel Fellow who manages technology standards and is sponsoring the enterprise IPv6 challenge within Bechtel. “This creates a challenge from the security standpoint of making sure the security mechanisms will do tracking [and] protection on both v4 and v6 concurrently.”
The problem, he said, is that “some people making security products are not quite there yet,” with “there” meaning product support of native IPv6 connectivity. “That’s kind of frustrating.”
Why does Bechtel want IPv6? Imagine the company rapidly deploying employees to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which the construction outfit in fact did. With the vast IP addressing space IPv6 has ushered in—its main draw—and its ability to turn every notebook, cell phone or other IP-enabled gadget into a server on the peer-to-peer network that IPv6’s endpoint-to-endpoint architecture enables, post-Katrina recovery would have been markedly different. For example, trailers could have been connected to each other dynamically once the IP cloud was established, with no work required from Bechtel’s IT people.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: IPv6: Ready or Not
