Opening the door to an efficiently managed IP future

IP Address Management

In order to connect to today’s networks, clients have to have IP addresses. Without IP addresses, networks wouldn’t work. Yet fail to manage them, and networks would grind to a halt anyway. When the number of IP addresses in use by BT shot past the 70 million mark, the hidden cost of trying to keep track of them was increasing even faster. The buck stopped at Kevin Bates’ door; and the answer was right there on his doorstep. Cygna IPControl™ from Cygna Labs brought things back in line. Now, although IP address numbers in BT will inevitably continue to grow, costs no longer keep pace.

Challenge

IP addresses are the unique identifiers that enable devices such as computers and printers to recognise and talk to each other across the internet and corporate infrastructures. It’s essential that they’re well managed: allocating the same IP address twice would be catastrophic. As a world-leading service provider BT already uses 70 million IP addresses. And the job of managing them is getting harder. “That quantity is growing rapidly as the company strives to support demand for new network-attached devices from both internal users and external customers,” explains Kevin Bates, Lead Designer for IP Address Management in BT Innovate and Design.

70,000,000

IP Addresses