Microsoft has introduced Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus, an advanced add-on designed to drastically reduce downtime for Cloud PCs during unexpected outages. It’s currently available in preview and set for general availability later in the sprint 2025. It aims to minimise Recovery Time Objective (RTO) to just 30 minutes – down from the previous four-hour benchmark for large tenants.
Downtime is the ultimate disruptor for any business, especially when it comes to productivity-critical systems like Cloud Services and of course Cloud PCs. Recognising the demand for quicker recovery times, Microsoft has introduced Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus which is currently in preview and will be a paid-for / licensed add-on for Windows 365 Enterprise customers.
Disaster Recovery Plus will offers much faster recovery times to address the limitations of its predecessor “Windows 365 Cross-Region Disaster Recovery” which launched in July 2024. Disaster Recover Plus is due to generally available from during spring this year (2025).
This will be a cost option and is designed for users within organisation whose Cloud PC use demands the highest levels of disaster recovery performance and speed of recovery in the event on an outage.
Sharper Focus on Recovery Times
The original Windows 365 cross-region disaster recovery feature presented huge value, enabling business continuity for Cloud PCs during unforeseen events. This service worked by created snapshots of Cloud PCs, which were stored securely in a secondary region defined by the customer. In the case of the need to invoke recovery, users were able to access temporary replicas of their Cloud PCs, complete with all applications and settings based on the most recent restore point – it worked pretty well.
There were however, some limitations. You see, while applications and settings were restored, unsaved work was irretrievable, making OneDrive or SharePoint essential for active file management (which of course most us use right!). Additionally, the recovery process could take up to four hours for larger tenants – which is longer than it takes most physcial devices to be reprovisioned.
Microsoft’s new Disaster Recovery Plus addresses the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) issue reducing recovery time down to around 30 minutes.
Configuring Disaster Recovery Plus
Configuration of Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus is configured in the Windows 365 configuration section within Intune under Devices > Windows 365 > User Settings > Optional Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.
These disaster recovery add-ons are designed to be used in case of a large outage and not individual or groups of users since this invokes the full disaster recovery process. During this outage (or of course when running a test) the Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus service will move selected users to their temporary Cloud PCs
Microsoft say that Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus may be applied to a set of individual users or user groups to provide fast and simple activation or deactivation.
Previews and Pricing
As is typical with Microsoft previews, IT admins will have the opportunity to try out this service free of charge. I have not yet seen pricing for the final service and how this will work, but I expect this to ROI based and of course optional for customers that need these higher level of RTO.
Conclusion and Thoughts
For customers for whom any loss of service costs money, the value proposition should be clear. Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus bridges a critical gap in the speed of recovery enabling businesses to restore operations significantly (around 8 times faster) in these high-stakes scenarios. The the ability to bring Cloud PCs back online within 30 minutes is a substantial improvement over the four-hour window that currently exists.
The question I guess remains, should this be a chargable extra or do customers just expect this level of performance as services like Windows 365 evolve.
You can read the full Microsoft article <– here —> :