Cross region disaster recovery in Windows 365

Windows 365 cross region disaster recovery is an optional service for Windows 365 Enterprise and Windows 365 Frontline (dedicated mode) that protects Cloud PCs and data against regional outages. When properly licensed and activated, it creates geographically distant temporary copies of Cloud PCs that can be accessed in the selected backup region. These copies help increase availability and preserve productivity.

Admins must manually activate and deactivate cross region disaster recovery.

The ability to restore in an alternate region depends on available capacity in that region at the time of the outage. Regardless of whether the device is able to restore at any given time, restore points are resilient in the alternate region.

Licensing

Cross Region Disaster Recovery applies only to Cloud PCs that meet both of the following conditions:

• A Windows 365 Cross Region Disaster Recovery add‑on license is assigned to the user.

• The Cloud PC user is included in a cross region disaster recovery user setting.

You can assign cross region disaster recovery to only a subset of users in a tenant. Cloud PCs without a cross region disaster recovery license are not affected and do not participate in cross‑region failover. Any per‑tenant guidance refers to service scale and capacity considerations. It does not require that all Cloud PCs in a tenant to be licensed for cross region disaster recovery or included in a failover. During a failover event, the RPO and RTO goals are determined by the number of cross region disaster recovery‑licensed Cloud PCs, not by the total number of Cloud PCs in the tenant.

Temporary Cloud PC

When activated, cross region disaster recovery temporarily creates a copy of the users’ Clouds PCs in an alternate region. It uses the latest restore point for each Cloud PC, and includes all installed applications, user settings, and data.

When the admin deactivates cross region disaster recovery after the outage event, the temporary Cloud PC is deleted. No applications, settings, data, or other information is preserved from the temporary Cloud PC.

When Cross‑Region Disaster Recovery is activated, Windows 365 fails over affected Cloud PCs in the selected backup region. If there is a Microsoft‑declared regional outage, Cloud PCs remain in the backup region until the outage is resolved.

Once Microsoft declares the primary region healthy again, an automatic failback occurs after up to 7 days—the 7‑day timer starts when the outage is declared over, not when cross region disaster recovery was activated. If cross region disaster recovery is activated without a Microsoft‑declared outage (for example, for a proactive or test scenario), Cloud PCs will automatically fail back after 7 days from activation. The 7‑day period is a fixed behavior and cannot be extended.

Restore point objective (RPO) and restore time objective (RTO)

If there's an outage, the service has the following target objectives for cross region disaster recovery:

• RTO: For tenants with fewer than 50,000 cross region disaster recovery‑licensed Cloud PCs, cross region disaster recovery targets a recovery time of less than 4 hours.

• RPO of <4 hours.

Cross‑Region Disaster Recovery is built to scale and support large recovery events during a regional outage. In most situations, Cloud PCs covered by cross region disaster recovery are recovered within the target recovery time of up to 4 hours, as long as sufficient capacity is available in the backup region. cross region disaster recovery is designed to handle recovery at scale, but it does not reserve capacity in advance, so recovery happens using available resources at the time of the outage.

As a general guideline, the 4‑hour RTO applies to up to 50,000 cross region disaster recovery‑enabled Cloud PCs per backup region. If more Cloud PCs than that are enabled for cross region disaster recovery in the same region, recovery will still proceed, but it may happen in waves, with Cloud PCs coming back online in stages as additional capacity becomes available. This approach allows recovery to continue smoothly without requiring customers to manage or coordinate the process themselves.

If your scenario requires guaranteed capacity or consistently tighter recovery timelines, Disaster Recovery Plus (DR+) is available as an option with pre‑allocated resources.

Multiple region outages

Cross region disaster recovery protects against data loss if there’s a regional outage or a complete data failure in the primary region. If the backup region lacks available capacity, or isn’t healthy during a disaster recovery event, the backup Cloud PC isn't provisioned. However, the data is still preserved and remain accessible in the backup region.

User experience

When cross region disaster recovery is activated, affected users receive a warning the next time they sign in to their Cloud PC.

After the cross region disaster recovery activation is complete, when a user signs in to their Cloud PC they receive a temporary Cloud PC. With this device, they get full user context, including:

• Configuration
• Data stored on the local disk
• User-installed applications up to the RPO for the device.

When the cross region disaster recovery is deactivated, the temporary device is discarded. The user is returned to their primary device, as it was before the disaster recovery event. No applications, settings, data, or other information saved to the Local OS disk (C drive) is preserved. Data stored in cloud storage, cloud applications, and so on, are unaffected by the Cloud PC disaster recovery event.

Next steps

Learn how to set up, activate/deactivate, and monitor cross region disaster recovery.