Business leaders are constantly asking IT departments how the public cloud can provide services that are so much faster, cheaper and more flexible than inhouse solutions. The answer is simple: automation. Future-ready data centers that leverage a software-defined foundation have high levels of automation that control and coordinate every facet of the environment, enabling service delivery that will meet business requirements today and tomorrow. A software-defined data center (SDDC) provides an easy-to-automate infrastructure foundation for delivering IT at the pace of business innovation. At the heart of the SDDC is the idea of abstracting the hardware and enabling its functionality in software. Hardware today is so fast that it’s no longer necessary to run everything in firmware. It’s possible instead to use a generic platform with specialized software that enables the core functionality, whether for a network switch or a storage controller. Firewalls, for example, were once specialized hardware appliances; today, they look like — and in fact are — general-purpose servers with specialized software. Virtualization has revolutionized computing and allowed unprecedented flexibility and speed of deployment. In a modern ecosystem, virtualization enables both portability of entire virtual servers to far-off data centers for disaster recovery and local virtual server replication for high availability. What used to require specialized hardware and complex cluster configuration can now be handled through a simple check box.