Prevent downtime & data loss with Dynamics 365 Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

This is where Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) comes in. Business continuity focuses on maintaining critical operations during a disruption—it’s the proactive foundation that ensures workflows, services, and customer-facing functions keep moving. Disaster recovery, on the other hand, is the reactive counterpart: restoring systems and data once the disruption has passed. Together, they form the backbone of any strategy designed to minimize impact and speed up recovery. 

Microsoft has recently expanded its disaster recovery options for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, offering a new self-service capability that gives organizations more control over how and where their recovery processes run. But before enabling anything new, it’s important to understand what’s already built into the platform—and where it makes sense to extend your strategy.

The foundation: What Microsoft already provides

When a production environment is created in Dynamics 365 or the Power Platform, it’s automatically set up in what Microsoft refers to as a primary region. Each of these regions belongs to a broader GEO—a geographical grouping that reflects regulatory and data sovereignty boundaries. For example, customers choosing a country within the EU are provisioned into the European GEO, ensuring compliance with GDPR and related regulations.

Within each region, Microsoft deploys customer environments across multiple Availability Zones. These zones represent physically separate data centers that are close enough to enable real-time, synchronous data replication, but far enough apart to minimize the risk that a local incident would impact more than one at the same time.

If a disruption occurs in one zone—say, a cooling system failure or a localized power issue—the system automatically fails over to another zone. This kind of resilience is not something you have to enable or configure. It’s a core part of Microsoft’s infrastructure design for production environments, and it doesn’t incur additional costs.

When regional resilience isn’t enough

The infrastructure behind Availability Zones provides a strong baseline for keeping operations stable during most local incidents. But this model has its boundaries: it's designed to safeguard environments within a single region. In the event of a broader disruption—one that impacts all zones in that region—automated failover isn't possible.

That’s where Microsoft’s self-service disaster recovery comes in. It adds an additional layer of protection, enabling you to replicate production environments across regions and take control of failover when the situation calls for it.

Taking it further: Microsoft’s new self-service disaster recovery

In April 2025, Microsoft made a new self-service disaster recovery feature generally available for Power Platform environments—including Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights. Unlike the built-in zone-based redundancy, this option allows customers to replicate their environments to a second region within the same GEO—but managed entirely by the customer.

Here’s how it works:

• Data is replicated asynchronously to a paired region—typically hundreds of kilometers away.
• You control when to activate a failover, either as a planned disaster recovery drill or an emergency response.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) targets are defined by you, not Microsoft.
• You can assess replication status before making a decision, including how recent the last successful data copy was.

This setup is ideal for organizations that need to test recovery workflows, document their business continuity plans, or ensure preparedness for audits. For example, you might simulate a failover to validate integrations, test latency, or confirm access roles in a new region. Once the test is complete, you can switch the environment back to its original region—without any data loss, because planned drills replicate data fully before switching over.

In contrast, emergency responses might result in slight data loss, depending on when the last replication occurred. The average unplanned failover during Microsoft’s public preview took under two minutes. That’s fast—but still carries implications for systems with tight tolerance thresholds.

Who it’s for—and how to enable it

The self-service capability is ideal for organizations that want to take a more active role in their recovery planning—whether for compliance, testing, or internal policy reasons. It’s available for:

• Production environments
• That are configured as managed environments
• And linked to a pay-as-you-go billing plan

Once enabled in the Power Platform Admin Center, the environment is asynchronously replicated to a paired region. From there, organizations can test failovers, monitor replication status, and take action when needed.

There is a cost: data replicated to the secondary region counts against your capacity. If you use more than your prepaid quota, overages are billed via your Azure subscription. 

This model offers flexibility and control—but also requires clear planning. The decision to enable it should align with your continuity strategy and operational needs.

Built-in vs. self-service – which is right for you?

If you're running production environments in Dynamics 365 and rely on Availability Zones, you already have a strong level of protection. For many, that’s sufficient.

But if your continuity strategy involves strict internal policies, regulatory requirements, or customer SLAs that demand tested failover scenarios, then self-service disaster recovery is worth considering. It brings flexibility—along with a need for clear planning and accountability.

The key question isn’t “Do we need this?” It’s “What level of control and visibility do we want over our recovery process?”