RBI has come out with a circular informing Indian payment gateways, banks, financial institutions, insurance companies and other transaction related Institutions that they should migrate from IPV4 to IPV6 address protocol by end of this year.
One of the 10 points that National Telecom Policy (NTP) 2012 put forward, was the thrust on Cloud Computing and the importance of moving to IPV6 addresses. The existing system of IPV4 address has saturated and all these addresses are expected to run out soon. IPV4 / IPV6 addresses are essentially unique addresses given to each device that is connected on the internet. However, given the exponential growth of Internet over past few years, move to IPV6 is inevitable.
Indian Government has already released a roadmap for National IPV6 Deployment, however, the progress has been quite slow.
Now, RBI has gone ahead and sent a circular where they are urging all payment gateways, banks, financial institutions, insurance companies, etc. including their websites to migrate to IPV6 by December 2012. RBI has also urged these institutions to create a special team that will handle the migration and complete it within the stipulated time. Department of Telecommunication also has setup a helpline for any clarifications/assistance on IPv6 implementation.
In my personal view, it will be very difficult to move on IPV6 till December 2012, unless they have already initiated the process.
Would love to hear your opinion…
