The need for organizations to deploy IPv6 is primarily driven by the fact that IPv4 and IPv6 do not natively interoperate.

As the proportion of IPv6 users increases with continuing IP address demand, the best approach to enable communications with these users is to deploy IPv6 while maintaining your IPv4 implementation. Survey respondents agreed that such a "dual stack" approach was favored over tunneling and translation approaches. This entails assigning both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address to each device on the network, say your web servers for example.

When assigning two addresses to your web server, you'll need to make sure your domain name server, DNS, is configured properly to direct your website "www address" to both the assigned IPv4 address and the IPv6 address. The dual stack approach enables end users of either protocol, IPv4 or IPv6, to reach your Internet servers, and to allow your users to communicate with other Internet servers (in accordance with your security policies of course!).

Should you decide not to deploy IPv6, your Internet presence will continue serving IPv4 users, which, as stated earlier, comprises a vast majority of Internet users today.

However, as the density of IPv6 users on the Internet grows, these users will be unable to reach your Internet sites. And your users will be unable to reach theirs. Certainly this is not an immediate threat to your ubiquitous Internet presence, but with shrinking IPv4 address capacity around the globe coupled with insatiable IP address demand, the population of IPv6 users will grow rapidly.