THRISSUR: The state government’s Internet Protocol (IP) address migration from the current IP Version 4 (IPv4) to IP Version 6 (IPv6) is likely to be delayed. This is owing to the delay in starting inventory auditing of the existing machines.According to the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) directive, all state and Central Government departments should migrate from the existing IPv4 to IPv6 services by March 31, 2012.However, the inventory auditing by the Central Government agency is yet to begin in the state. At present, third party auditors, KPMG - a central government-empanelled agency - is entrusted with the task of conducting auditing on security and vulnerability of IPv4 services prior to the migration.An official with the Kerala State IT Mission said: “Kerala cannot meet with the proposed timeline because we have not yet started the inventory of machines. “We have to procure new appliances and deploy IPv6 complaint equipment. Security angle mock drill of IPv6 addresses and parallel run of both addresses should be held. It is also necessary to ensure that there is no problem in migrating critical addresses like that of the police. If there is any problem, the new address IPv6 should be reverted back to IPv4. So,it is a time-consuming process and we need to prepare.”As part of the migration process, around 300 state government IP addresses will be upgraded to IPv6. It is to be noted that the training programme to impart knowledge on IPv6 has not started in the state. The funds to migrate to IPv6 will be provided by the Centre. But, it would be allotted only after completing the inventory report. The report will explain as to how many machines should be replaced and whether the security has to be increased.The decision to migrate to IPv6 was taken when IPv4 was found exhaustive. The benefit of migrating to IPv6 is that the latter can support more number of IP Addresses than the former. IPv4 can support on 4.3 billion addresses while IPv6 can support 340 sextillion IP addresses.
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