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.

What would you be doing right now if the Internet didn't exist? The world wide web as we know it is only a few decades old, but it's hard to imagine life without it. I fondly recall the early days of the "personal" Internet, when I used a 56k modem and waited anxiously for that oh-so-familiar connecting sound to access my AOL account and check if I had mail. We've come a long way from those humble beginnings.

APIs have become indispensable to modern digital businesses, not least because of their flexibility and ease of integration.