2012 US Government IPv6 Mandate: The Day of Reckoning

Well, today is the day, or the last day I should say.  At midnight tonight, the US Government will have shut the books on yet another Fiscal Year.  Although, it’s not finances that has the technology industry glued to government tech news; it’s IPv6 adoption.  By the end of FY 2012, the entire US Government (all 1,498 federal domains per data.gov and NIST) should have followed through on their mandate to implement IPv6 on their publicly-facing services (per White House 2010 Directive).  Did they do it?  Not at all – that is, the mandate was to reach 100% adoption.  The good news is that a good portion made it.  The bad news is the agencies that had serious problems made almost no progress since four months ago.  This includes the DoD (e.g. DISA).

In May of 2012, only 43 websites had transitioned and made their website publicly accessible over IPv6.  Today that number is 272 (see graph below), and it’s only 25% total.   DNS and Mail followed a similar pattern.

If your curious about where your favorite agency falls, take a look at the NIST IPv6 Government Deployment Tracker here.

http://usgv6-deploymon.antd.nist.gov/images/graph-gov.png

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