Introducing Managed Availability for Power Platform
Enterprise Grade Reliability and Availability for Mission Critical Workloads
In a world where every second of downtime can mean lost revenue, disrupted operations, and frustrated users, high availability isn’t optional—it’s mission-critical. In an era where AI-driven agents power mission-critical workflows, ensuring always-on availability is essential for business continuity. Traditional backup and restore strategies are reactive, slow, and no longer sufficient for modern enterprises that demand instant failover, automated resilience, and no disruption.
Managed availability for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform is a set of capabilities designed to ensure continuous uptime, seamless failover, and enterprise-grade resilience for mission-critical applications and AI workloads. Built on Azure, these capabilities safeguard business operations against failures, outages, and disruptions. Whether responding to localized infrastructure issues or events that impact entire geographic regions, managed availability ensures that Dynamics 365 applications and Power Platform resources such as Power Apps, Power Automate flows and Copilot Studio agents, remain highly available, self-healing, and disaster-proof—maximizing reliability without compromising performance.
Customers across a range of industries such as NHS, Siemens, Coca Cola, HSBC, Xiaomi, ThyssenKrup and Nestle are leveraging the Dynamics 365 / Power Platform today to run critical business processes and systems. With the launch of Managed Availability, Microsoft is providing added resiliency for mission critical workloads and flexible options for customers to implement their backup and disaster recovery strategies.
Increased Resiliency with Azure Availability Zones
Microsoft Dynamics 365 / Power Platform runs on Microsoft Azure and now leverages Azure availability zones. Your applications and associated resources are stored in a container called an environment, which is hosted in a region of your choice.
Environments designated for production workloads are replicated synchronously across at least two (and typically three) physically separated Azure zones within the selected region. These zones are independent datacenters with separate power, networking, and cooling, ensuring zero data loss and rapid failover (RTO < 5 min) in case of a failure. This means that if one availability zone (AZ) experiences a failure (for example, due to a network outage, power disruption, or environmental disaster), customer traffic is automatically redirected to the other zones with minimal service disruption. Your applications and resource running will not experience an outage because the Dynamics 365 / Power Platform continuously ensures seamless failover and uninterrupted performance.
Build Confidence with Automated Backups and Self-Serve Disaster Recovery
Environments that have a database are automatically backed up and can be restored to any selected system backup in the last seven days. You can optionally increase this window to 28 days by making an environment managed.
With Self-Serve Disaster Recovery (DR) you can define, test, and execute a cross-region failover approach for your Dynamics 365 / Power Platform environments, enabling you to meet compliance requirements and ensuring that your workloads continue to run in the event of an unexpected region-wide issue.
When the Self-Serve DR is enabled for an environment, a copy of the environment is seamlessly maintained in a secondary region, ensuring business continuity even in the face of large-scale disruptions. This ensures that even in the event of a large-scale regional disruption, workloads can seamlessly failover to a secondary region, minimizing downtime and impact.
With Self-Serve DR, you are in control and can choose when to execute failover drills (which are often required for meeting compliance requirements), and when to perform emergency failovers and failbacks.
Self-Serve DR also supports an emergency response mode. In the event of a major outage, switching to emergency response mode prioritizes getting services back online as soon as possible. This means skipping data replication and instead switching to the last fully validated copy to restore operations quickly. You can monitor each phase of the failover process, from validation to execution, ensuring transparency and control. Whether performing a DR drill or an emergency response failover, the replication lag between regions is typically under 15 minutes.
Powering AI with Always-On Availability
As businesses embrace custom AI agents built with Microsoft Copilot Studio to power intelligent workflow automation, enhance decision-making, and drive business operations, ensuring these agents remain available, responsive, and resilient is critical. Managed availability builds on our other managed platform capabilities, which collectively ensure that you can run these agents securely and at scale, and benefit from a platform designed to protect them in the face of a broad range of unforeseen events.
