A Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC) is an IT platform that uses cloud technology to enhance the speed, power, and scalability of data center operations. SDDCs evolved from server virtualization features introduced by VMware in the mid-2000s. Instead of relying on physical servers, storage solutions, and networking hardware, SDDCs operate on virtualized infrastructure that can extend over a wider hardware footprint.
SDDCs are also known as virtual data centers. Instead of operating on purpose-built physical hardware, SDDCs pool infrastructure resources across multiple systems. This makes it much easier to provision and manage data center assets without having to rely on slow and cumbersome procurement operations.
SDDCs use cloud technology to build a layer of abstraction between data center hardware and the infrastructure it provides. This allows organizations to leverage modern cloud technology on a deeper layer than traditional data centers.
Virtualization technologies. SDDC technology lets organizations deploy storage virtualization, server virtualization, and more through a hypervisor. Establishing a virtual infrastructure layer lets organizations build additional processes on top, enabling infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
Automation and orchestration. SDDC establishes a standard policy-driven language for making IT assets work together. This opens the way for automation and cross-platform orchestration between assets that would otherwise be challenging to integrate.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning. Keeping IT infrastructure abstracted from physical hardware allows organizations to use data in innovative ways. Leveraging machine learning or predictive AI is much easier when data center contents are accessible according to a consistent architectural plan.
In a traditional data center environment, software engineers and developers have a hard limit on the amount of IT resources they can use at any given time. Once they hit that limit, the team must wait, sometimes for months, for the organization to purchase and provision new physical infrastructure.
This creates problems for organizations that value scalability and business agility. When meeting customer expectations means capitalizing on rapidly changing marketplace conditions, teams must be able to access and expand data center resources in minutes, not months.
In an SDDC environment, the technology behind server virtualization makes this possible. Pooling infrastructure resources and abstracting them from physical equipment allows teams to accelerate data center provisioning, reduce hardware expenses, and boost IT agility.
In practical terms, SDDCs expand cloud technology to the data center environment. This enables IT teams to standardize their management tools across multiple infrastructure layers and use policies to control provisioning. This paves the way to policy automation and optimized management capabilities that are not possible in a traditional data center environment.
Both SDDC and cloud operating models rely on virtualization to deliver scalability and cost efficiency to organizations. However, they focus on two different parts of the organization’s IT environment.
The main difference between SDDC and cloud computing is the focus on infrastructure and architecture. SDDC concentrates on defining standard interfaces between pooled IT assets, while cloud computing leans more towards user-oriented services and capabilities.
That means that the two technologies are complementary. SDDC is one way an organization could build and deploy service level cloud capabilities.
It is not the only way, though. An organization could use a vendor-specific architecture for the same purpose, or build cloud computing capabilities into a physical on-premises data center.
SDDCs are made of three main components. Each of these components rely on virtualization to coordinate data center operations in a way that’s independent of the hardware supporting them.
Server Virtualization uses software to manage server resources, like processing power and memory. This eliminates the need to manage server resources and hardware compatibilities while making it easy to expand capacity when needed.
Network Virtualization uses software to manage networking resources independently of the routers, switches, and other hardware assets the organization owns. This makes splitting bandwidth and assigning channels to specific data center resources much easier, faster, and more secure.
Storage Virtualization pools physical storage hardware from multiple devices into a single, distributed storage device. Administrators can then subdivide storage according to usage and security characteristics without worrying about the underlying hardware itself.
SDDCs rely on a centralized interface for managing these three components according to business needs. This interface translates requests from users, applications, policies, and service-level agreements into data center operations.
SDDCs offer considerable benefits compared to the traditional on-premises data centers they typically replace. Here are some of the advantages that the software-defined approach enjoys over brick-and-mortar data centers:
Enhanced Agility and Flexibility. Software-defined infrastructure dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes to create and provision IT resources. Instead of spending days or weeks configuring hardware servers, users can rely on policy-driven automation to deploy resources in minutes.
Improved Efficiency and Lower Costs. SDDCs consolidate duplicate functions that would otherwise remain isolated from one another. This helps control costs and helps IT leaders improve utilization.
Increased Security and Compliance. In an SDDC environment, resource provisioning is executed according to predefined policies. These policies follow established governance and accessibility rules, making them much more secure than ad-hoc configurations performed manually.
Cloud-delivered Scalability. Pooling infrastructure resources makes it easier to expand data center operations on an as-needed basis. Since this is achievable without additional on-premises hardware, it adds less risk to the decision to scale cloud infrastructure upwards.
Sustainable Cost Structure. Many organizations implement SDDC using hybrid or public cloud infrastructure. This allows them to shift from a capital expenditures (CAPEX) to operating expenditures (OPEX) model, enhancing the scalability of cloud-dependent infrastructure and services.
Simplified Management. Traditional data centers require multiple applications and IT tools to manage effectively. SDDC consolidates this requirement into a single, unified dashboard that provides access to all the tools and services a database administrator needs to manage their workload.
Migrating from a traditional data center to a virtual data center can involve risk. IT leaders who prepare for the challenges that come with this process will be better positioned to ensure a smooth transition to the newly optimized infrastructure environment.
Here are some of the challenges IT leaders commonly face when undertaking SDDC migration:
Obtaining cross-functional buy-in. To benefit from SDDC, the organization must establish standard workflows across multiple teams and departments. This isn’t always easy because it means people will have to give up siloed processes and policies. The more enthusiastic team members are about SDDC’s benefits, the easier this step will be.
Technical challenges and skill requirements. Managing SDDC infrastructure demands expertise with automation, scripting, and API integration. IT leaders may need to prioritize onboard specialist talent with experience managing SDDC vendor technologies like VMware vSphere and Aria.
Cost implications. SDDC implementation comes with infrastructure costs, operational costs, and management costs. Optimizing infrastructural efficiency is vital to keeping these costs down.
Security concerns. SDDC security is driven by policies. The responsibility for creating secure policies will fall on your IT team, creating a need for cloud security expertise. Misconfigured policies can lead to security vulnerabilities if they are not rapidly addressed.
Integration and compatibility issues. Abstracting data center operations from hardware is not always simple. If existing hardware, software, or networking systems are not supported, it may slow down the SDDC deployment process.
Choosing the right vendor. Organizations pursuing SDDC implementation must deploy a software platform that supports their infrastructural needs. Different vendors come with unique strengths and weaknesses, which may include vendor lock-in risks.
Start by assessing your organization’s readiness for SDDC. Organizations migrating from a traditional IT environment may have difficulty establishing standardized procedures in an SDDC environment. It may take time to build consensus between major stakeholders and obtain buy-in.
Once that step is complete, you can begin to plan your SDDC migration. Many organizations use cloud services to enhance the speed and reliability of this process, removing the need to repeat the process of building new architecture to support SDDC operations.
With a cloud-based SDDC, you can avoid the costly purchase of physical infrastructure and establish the new environment entirely in the cloud. You may also leverage existing infrastructure in a hybrid cloud environment, resulting in a more flexible data center infrastructure.
Take time to compare SDDC vendors and their offerings to one another. Some vendors provide a full infrastructure-building tech stack with software-defined networking and storage included. Others do not, but may offer advantageous pricing to offset the difference in value. Find the option that best suits your organization’s existing infrastructure capabilities and its plans for the future.
Software-defined data centers offer unique benefits to organizations in different industries. The ability to maintain visibility and control over infrastructural deployments and provisioning according to predefined policies can be a powerful advantage, especially in tightly regulated or high-risk industries.
Healthcare institutions are under pressure to maintain compliance with strict data security regulations like HIPAA. At the same time, they must maintain interoperability between a large number of devices, applications, and cloud-delivered services.
This is both difficult and expensive to achieve in a traditional data center environment. Ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of Protected Health Information (PHI) requires deep visibility and control over the infrastructure that data relies on.
An SDDC environment provides visibility and control by virtualizing healthcare systems according to consistent, standardized compliance rules. Virtualization technology ensures newly provisioned IT assets inherit a compliance policy base at every stage in the asset lifecycle. This keeps cloud-enabled workflows secure while enabling automation and scalability.
Financial institutions must adhere to strict data processing regulations while remaining agile enough to adapt to changing market conditions quickly. With a typical on-premises data center, these two responsibilities often come into conflict, reducing the effectiveness of the institution’s products and strategies.
At the same time, financial institutions must report to compliance and oversight authorities while keeping their operations secure against cybercrime. Policy-driven infrastructure automation offers clear benefits to organizations that need to combine flexibility, efficiency, and security.
SDDC gives financial institutions the ability to consolidate management processes and improve security without slowing down the process of building and deploying new financial products. When the entire organization’s infrastructure follows consistent provisioning and deployment rules, it becomes much easier to maintain the balance between usability and security across departments and product lines.
Retailers are increasingly pursuing omnichannel strategies that put their products on as many platforms as possible. This increases their visibility and appeal, directly improving market performance. However, it adds considerable complexity to inventory management and control, especially during high-volume peak retail season.
This complexity is even greater for retailers that want to harness the power of advanced data analytics and create personalized customer experiences. Traditional data centers do not offer the observability and connectivity these organizations need.
Instead, they rely on SDDC technology to scale their infrastructure in response to market fluctuations. This approach lets retailers maintain control over inventory, sales, and marketing analytics operations according to robust policies without having to manually scale upwards when peak season hits.
SDDC represents a significant step forward for organizations that demand agile IT operations supported by scalable infrastructure. Many organizations are still in the process of transitioning to SDDC, while vendors continue to innovate and improve the value of the software-defined approach.
Experts predict the software-defined data center industry will grow by a compound annual growth rate of 19% from 2023 to 2032. This growth will fuel investment in new features and technological capabilities. Some of the trends currently driving innovation in the software-defined data center industry include:
Enhanced AI and machine learning capabilities. Eliminating data and operations siloes across organizations will help IT teams leverage AI and machine learning more effectively. SDDC infrastructure has an important role to play helping IT leaders implement AI-enhanced operations across a consistent and accessible tech stack.
Facilitating Edge Computing and IoT. As organizations build larger and more complex networks, the need to distribute applications closer to data sources will increase. SDDC facilitates this by establishing consistent policies and standards for provisioning applications anywhere in the IT environment.
Cybersecurity Automation in SDDC. Cybersecurity professionals can’t rely on manual processes when faced with overwhelming volumes of alerts, changes, and potential vulnerabilities. Policy-driven provisioning will help reduce the attack surface and provide analysts with more visibility and control over the organization’s security posture.
SDDC-Enabled Business Innovation and Resilience. Organizations can leverage SDDC technology to accelerate software application development while reducing dependencies on specific platforms and infrastructure. This will make it easier for development teams to collaborate across complex distributed environments.
Taking a software-defined approach to infrastructure provides an opportunity to dramatically improve security performance. Data centers are vulnerable to several different categories of threats, including:
Cyberattacks, including Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, phishing attempts, and remote exploitation of vulnerabilities.
Physical security risks, such as hardware theft, insider threats, and sabotage operations.
Environmental hazards and natural disasters, which can disrupt the power supply and lead to data loss.
Supply chain attacks, where threat actors infiltrate data centers by compromising third-party service providers.
Implementing SDDC addresses many of these risks, giving the organization greater resilience and enabling business continuity against disruptive threats like ransomware. Some risks, such as physical security, can be effectively outsourced to a cloud infrastructure provider under the shared responsibility model.
The uniformity of the SDDC environment makes it easier to secure against advanced threats. Since data center operations follow a consistent policy-driven structure and format, it’s much harder for threat actors to find blind spots or other vulnerabilities to exploit.
This is not the case in a traditional data center environment. Security teams may be responsible for multiple types of hardware assets running different operating systems. Data may be duplicated across assets, or siloed across different filesystems. This kind of data fragmentation is an obstacle to database security.
However, realizing security gains through SDDC still requires capable leadership and technical expertise. To adopt an automation-ready, policy-driven security posture, organizations need qualified security specialists that can create, maintain, and update those policies.
Bitdefender’s comprehensive Cloud Native Security solution helps organizations secure SDDC deployments on cloud infrastructure. This solution is a Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) that combines multiple technologies into a single solution:
GravityZone CSPM+ grants visibility and control over cloud asset risks, including misconfigurations and over-privileged identities. It helps security teams meet compliance goals while supporting threat detection and response operations on cloud infrastructure and it protects sensitive data and improves compliance in multi-cloud environments. It ensures secure, efficient control over access policies for virtualized assets, including SDDCs.
Cloud Workload Protection (CWP) protects virtualized environments with centralized management and cost-efficient architecture. This reduces the complexity of securing enterprise cloud deployments that include SDDC.
GravityZone Container Security specifically protects against security threats to containerized workloads in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It provides visibility into container security threats and eliminates Linux compatibility issues using a kernel-agnostic security agent.
GravityZone Cloud and Server Security offers control and visibility into private data centers, public clouds, and SDDC deployments through a unified interface. It eliminates security blind spots while consolidating data center security management through a lightweight agent that helps improve VM density by up to 55%.
Software-defined data centers run on virtualized infrastructure, delivering networking, storage, CPU, and security as a service. This gives organizations more flexibility and scalability, while enabling policy-driven automation and asset provision.
Software-defined networking (SDN) virtualizes network functionality, and is a component of software defined data centers. Within SDDCs, server virtualization abstracts physical hardware on which virtual machines operate, while SDNs abstract network devices like switches, routers, and network cards.
Data center software controls the configuration of IT assets in a software-defined data center. Since there is no need to manually configure physical devices, IT administrators can configure virtualized assets across the entire data center at once using this kind of software.