Many enterprises are planning to transition their working environments to IPv6 over the next two to ten years. But long transition horizons should not fool IT organizations into thinking that all IPv6 issues can be deferred to the future. End points – PCs and Macs as well as smartphones and tablets – are enabled with IPv6 today. Carriers provide IPv6 services, and moderately modern routers and switches are IPv6-ready. These facts raise a key issue: you may very well have IPv6 connectivity and traffic in your enterprise today. If it’s not in your network policy to allow that, you’re out of compliance. Confirm that your security infrastructure is properly enabled and configured.

Problems with application and network performance on the WAN and Internet links are caused by many and varied issues – congestion, latency, protocol design, sudden bursts of disruptive traffic – all contribute. New factors make the calculus even more complicated: social networking, BYOD, cloud applications, growing video content, even IPv6 traffic growing in the shadows. It’s tempting to respond to these problems by jumping to a single set of technologies that fix certain aspects of performance. We recommend, instead, that you take advantage of Blue Coat expertise and technology to take the four simple steps described in this paper.