Renewed Interest in IPv4 Addresses

[Rakhirandiseo]

If it's not broken, why fix it?
While investing in network security measures is easily justified by the clear and present danger of cyber threats, prioritizing necessary but not urgent “cleaning” can be more difficult. In fact, delaying cleanup can leave assets exposed to security risks or vulnerable to exploitation by attackers. Fragile or unstable configurations can cause a minor event to turn into a cascading failure that is often difficult to resolve.

An often overlooked example of this mounting debt is the failure to actively manage and optimize IP address and Domain Name System (DNS) configurations—the very pillars of corporate canada mobile database communications. Internet service providers (ISPs) that provide dedicated Internet access (DIA) to businesses often assign blocks of addresses to customers. If those customers ever leave the ISP, the ISP often has to go through a cleanup process to restore those resources.

Enterprises undergoing reorganizations or mergers/acquisitions may lose track of (or never have had good track of) IP address ranges. In this case, security and routing policies may become outdated, allowing an IP address hijacker to penetrate the security perimeter.

Companies that use Network Address Translation (NAT) or Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT) to share a single IP address among many devices may find that these features, which edit data packets in flight, create unexpected failure modes. Sometimes they hide problems, such as when malware runs within the NAT boundaries or address snooping occurs. Sometimes small problems become disproportionately large when one attacker ruins the reputation of an address used by many. Troubleshooting day-to-day operations becomes increasingly difficult and costs increase as the network architecture that worked in the past is no longer suitable for expansion, perhaps due to organic growth or mergers/acquisitions.

Despite the continued growth of IPv6, IPv4 is still required for general Internet connectivity. As a result, growing networks continue to require additional IPv4 addresses, which has led to a vibrant resale market.