Power Out, Systems On: How Cloud Resilience Kept Operations Running.

By Behan Venter, CTO, Hudson Cloud Systems

When an emergency power shutdown at one of our customer's buildings required them to close their campus and clinic, operations could easily have come to a halt. With power and air conditioning offline for urgent unplanned maintenance, the building was cleared and locked down by mid-afternoon. Yet while the facility went dark, the digital environment - built and managed by Hudson Cloud Systems - remained fully operational in Azure, allowing faculty and staff to continue their work remotely if needed.

Throughout the outage, our Azure Virtual Desktop infrastructure kept systems running smoothly in the cloud. Although local network equipment and thin clients were offline, all desktops, servers, and data remained stable and accessible. Our team monitored the environment to verify there were no dependencies on local resources and that Azure operations stayed fully intact. When power was restored the next morning, the thin clients were powered on and came back online instantly, allowing users to reconnect to their cloud desktops without any issues or recovery steps.

The event was an unexpected reminder of why we build for resilience. By hosting critical infrastructure in Azure and keeping on-premises components minimal, recovery from a full building shutdown was effortless. In moments when others might face complex restarts or data issues, the systems simply resumed as if nothing had happened. It helps to simplify the complicated.