Colombia. It was never expected in 1983, when the V4 IP communication protocol was created, which allowed each electronic device to have its own route to connect to the Internet, which in just 35 years would exhaust the 4 billion addresses that were made available to users at that time. Faced with this new need, the IP version 6 was created that will reign for another three decades.
According to Gustavo León, CGO Business Operational Manager and speaker at the Expo DataNet fair, which will be held in Bogotá between October 3 and 5 in Bogotá, "the new protocol that has been in operation for 6 years and has the capacity to provide 340 sextillion addresses, will meet the needs of the planet for another 3 decades but its implementation has been very slow, especially in our country."
And it is that Colombia, although it is no stranger to the increase in computational and communications technologies, and has experienced the boom of IT innovations in both wired and wireless devices, is reluctant to make the transition between IP V4 and IP V6, and this trend is manifested in the poor percentage of 0.63% of traffic in version 6 in the country, that is, it does not even reach 1% of its use.
For the engineer León, who will speak at Expo DataNet about "How to make the transition process to the IPv6 protocol without setbacks", everything is due to a general lack of information, although the public sector in the country has already taken the lead. León assures that "following the guidelines of Circular 002 -of July 6, 2011- of the Ministry of Information and Communications Technologies, official organizations have already taken advantage and at least 25 of these have advanced in this transition".
One of the widespread fears is that of the "blackout" of connectivity in organizations and that is why the Mintic, in the aforementioned circular, anticipates to make an analysis and suggest how to face the transition, ensuring that hardware, software and service infrastructures continue to operate normally while the change is made.
According to the Expo Datanet expert, the smartest thing is for organizations and their IT departments to begin to evaluate the resources, times and contingencies that this adoption will have that sooner or later will be mandatory because it is estimated that by 2025 the IP V4 blackout will be carried out, so by then all organizations will have to have adopted the new protocol.
It is important to note that the change from one protocol to the other should be gradual and according to the expert, it should occur in 4 phases:
Planning: This validates the technological assets, their infrastructure, own applications and devices because some of these may or may not work when migrating to IP V6.
- Deployment: Devices and applications are enabled.
- Functionality testing: The implementation is carried out in the production phase.
- Monitoring: A final evaluation follow-up is carried out.
Finally, it is important to allocate the economic resources that must be provided because the cost of the service to receive the new IP address prefix will cost each organization 2,500 dollars and maintenance 600 dollars per year, without taking into account the technological implementation that can cost between 30 and 1800 million, depending on the size of the organization.
This theme will be part of the academic space of Expo Data Net Andino, an event that is held for the first time in Bogotá on October 3, 4 and 5 with the purpose of updating knowledge about new technologies and the IT world market, a space also conducive to strengthening the capacity in decision-making regarding the purchase of products and services.
