Stephen, you neglected to look at the big picture. The "organization" has the /16 but has sites spread out all over the planet and has assigned /24's to them. Additionally, they connect into the global net via
diverse
providers.
Ah, I got -snip- happy there :) in that case I would question the logic of being given a large address block only to break it into pieces all over the world.
I'd wonder why they dont take address space from a regional provider - if its only /24 it cant be that mission critical for bgp and multihoming...
The /16 was acquired way back when. Until now, its been used primarily for internal addressing (ie, no NAT). But now the internet presence is growing and the distributed nature of the sites plus the multiple providers forces us to use /24s. Making use of a regional provider's address space may be best for us in Europe and Asia. The North American sites all have the same providers... ...so, we could advertise /24 to these providers and have them advertise /16. Then the regional providers could give us some Class C /24s and our Distributed Director could match a particular user with the nearest server farm. I think this is probably the best approach.