An industrial software defined network (SDN) architecture, system and methods for centralized and simplified management of an industrial network is disclosed. The industrial SDN architecture comprises of an infrastructure plane including physical and virtual devices, a control plane comprising controllers to control and manage the physical and virtual devices in the infrastructure plane, the logically centralized controllers including a network controller, a virtualization management controller and a cybersecurity controller, an application plane comprising one or more end user industrial applications, and a platform plane comprising a set of software services and application programming interfaces (APIs) to define a communication interface to the application plane to the north and the control plane to the south to provide an industrial application in the application plane programmatic access to one or more of the plurality of the controllers in the control plane for simplified and centralized management of the industrial network.