Software Defined Networking (SDN) The goal of Software-Defined Networking is to enable cloud and network engineers and administrators to respond quickly to changing business requirements via a centralized control console. In a most basic sense, software defined networking separates the part of the networking infrastructure that decides where information is being sent (called the ‘control plane’) from the part where the data actually moves (the ‘data plane’), and allows the decision making part to happen in the software application.