Back in February, while Louisville, Ky., was defrosting after a freak storm buried the city in ice, IT exec Brian Cox was dreaming not of warmer climes but of desktop virtualization. The storm left Cox, who is director of IT customer service at Norton Healthcare, scrambling to create temporary desktops for about 200 employees from an outlying billing office who had been knocked off the power grid. "You can go for a day or two without power and get caught up, but once the outage hits three or four days, if you're not getting your bills out the door, especially with time-sensitive Medicare and Medicaid, you don't get paid for services you provided," he says. Three days into the outage, Cox began setting up workers at PCs or terminals in training rooms and other temporary spots and loading up their applications. "If we had had desktop virtualization in place for them, many could have worked from home, a different office or contingency location like a hotel and have had access to their applications right away. We would have been able to say, 'OK, log in here just like you do from the office,' and they'd have been back to work in no time." Fortunately, the situation wasn't as dire as it could have been. Norton already had embraced a virtual desktop infrastructure for the company’s five hospitals, plus a few specialized cases. One of those special instances involved moving billing types that required no "human touch" onto the virtualized infrastructure -- meaning, onto hosted desktops in the data center. "When the power went out, the billing office, the lady running those systems was able to work from home and she got 50% of the bills out the door," Cox says.