Since its initial conception on the back of a napkin, BGP has been an essential part of the Internet. However, its ubiquity and simplicity also make it a potential weak spot in any organization's Internet Stack. As an open, near-universal protocol it's a vector for potentially malicious attacks. It can also cause the same amount of problems simply through misconfiguration (in fact telling the difference between the two can be a challenge in and of itself).

Internet disruptions can be a real headache for any organization, but for eCommerce companies in particular, they’re proving to be a lot more than just an inconvenience. A new study by Forrester Consulting is bound to send shockwaves through the industry by quantifying the actual cost of Internet disruptions. Spoiler alert: it’s higher than you think.

IPv6 was developed in the late 1990s as a successor to IPv4 in response to widespread concerns about the growth of the Internet and its potential impact on the existing IPv4 address protocol, in particular potential address exhaustion. It was assumed that after some time as a dual-stack solution, we would phase out IPv4 entirely. Almost twenty-five years later, however, we are approaching full-scale depletion of IPv4 addresses, in part because the adoption of IPv6 is still lagging.