IPv6 Reality vs. Enterprise Reality – Why We’re Still Carrying IPv4 Into 2025
02 Dec 2025 · networking, ipv6, infrastructure, architecture, strategy, core2code
Why we are still dragging IPv4 dependencies into 2025 – and what that reveals about our IT landscapes
The technical reality is clear: IPv6 is production-ready, stable, enables far more efficient addressing, is better suited for modern network architectures, and is globally available. Mobile networks, IoT platforms, cloud providers and even many home-network setups are already “IPv6-first.” Even my own ISP now provides only a single public IPv6 address — IPv4 is delivered exclusively via Dual-Stack-Lite. That forces you to clean things up: clear segmentation, clean prefix delegation, unambiguous routes. And suddenly you realize: it works surprisingly elegantly.
And then you step into the enterprise reality.
There you find:
- internal RFC1918 zones that have been exhausted for years
- firewalls that support IPv6, but nobody is allowed to use it
- cloud workloads with public IPv6, backed by IPv4-only systems
- NAT cascades so deep that no one fully understands them anymore
- security processes that ignore IPv6, even though endpoints already use it actively
In short: we run modern systems on a protocol from 1981 and then wonder about complexity, latency and fragmentation.
Why is this happening?
Not because of the technology. IPv6 is not the problem.
The blockers are structural:
- operating models optimized around IPv4 workarounds
- change processes that treat routing as inherently risky
- security teams that prefer to “filter IPv6 away” instead of modernizing policies
- appliances and platforms that were never properly updated
- hybrid architectures without a coherent end-to-end network strategy
The result is a costly and fragile transitional state that already produces more overhead than the migration itself would.
What should happen instead?
The question is no longer whether IPv6 makes sense, but why we still design new systems without IPv6 in 2025.
A sensible approach would be:
- Dual-stack by default, not as an exception
- Conscious IPv6 segmentation, instead of adding more NAT layers
- Updated security policies, instead of blocking IPv6 entirely
- Enable IPv6 internally, before the cloud forces the change
- Simplify network design, instead of extending old IPv4 crutches
IPv6 does not increase complexity. It removes the complexity we accumulated through decades of IPv4 workarounds.
The real point
The IPv6 gap does not prove that technology is slow. It shows how difficult it is for enterprises to address strategic infrastructure questions proactively. And how much the mindset of “it somehow works” has become part of our operational models.
IPv6 would be a release — technically, operationally, and security-wise. We just need to implement it.
