The CrowdStrike outage in July 2024 hit endpoint management hard at many of the organizations I work with. Recovering Windows devices remotely when they refused to boot was painful, and it made one thing clear. Even good endpoint security and solid patch processes can turn against you. At Ignite, Microsoft announced the Windows Resiliency Initiative, a roadmap meant to make Windows hold up better against exactly this kind of disruption. Most of it is still in the pipeline, though. Below I go through what is actually changing, what you can test already and what is, for now, only an announcement.

The CrowdStrike outage taught admins hard lessons about recovery

The faulty CrowdStrike update in July left countless Windows devices unbootable overnight. For many admins there was no remote fix. Someone had to go to each machine in person, usually under time pressure and often without easy access to BitLocker keys or decent recovery images. I wrote about what went wrong and what it means for device recovery in an earlier post, BitLocker recovery keys: Lessons from the CrowdStrike outage. The Windows Resiliency Initiative is Microsoft's direct response, and the experience from those weeks is now shaping changes across the Windows platform.

The Windows Resiliency Initiative bundles four building blocks

Microsoft groups several components under the Windows Resiliency Initiative. They all aim at faster recovery and fewer single points of failure. According to the official announcement on the Windows blog and the Windows security documentation, the initiative covers these parts:

  • Quick Machine Recovery: Devices will be able to repair Windows from WinRE through Windows Update, even when the main OS won't boot. It comes to Windows Insiders only, in 2025.
  • Out-of-kernel antivirus: Security vendors will be able to run their AV code outside the Windows kernel, which limits the damage a kernel-level crash can do. This is in private preview only, with no GA timeline.
  • Administrator Protection: Just-in-time elevation for local admin rights, meant to lower the risk of lateral movement. It has been announced, but there is no public preview yet.
  • Hotpatch for Windows 11 Enterprise 24H2: Security patches install without a reboot, as they already do on Azure servers. This one is in public preview now for Enterprise 24H2 devices.

The Mermaid diagram below shows how the pieces fit together and which of them you can use now versus which are still on the roadmap:

flowchart TD
    Incident["CrowdStrike outage"] --> Initiative["Windows Resiliency Initiative"]
    Initiative --> Recovery["Quick Machine Recovery"]
    Initiative --> Antivirus["Out-of-kernel antivirus"]
    Initiative --> AdminProt["Administrator Protection"]
    Initiative --> Hotpatch["Hotpatch Windows 11 24H2"]
    Hotpatch --> Now["Preview now"]
    Recovery --> Roadmap["Windows Insider 2025+"]
    Antivirus --> Roadmap
    AdminProt --> Roadmap

Figure: The building blocks of the Windows Resiliency Initiative, split into available and announced

Admins can pilot hotpatch today and prepare for the rest

Out of all these features, only hotpatch for Windows 11 Enterprise 24H2 is ready for real pilots right now. If you run Enterprise-licensed devices on 24H2, you can enroll them in the preview and manage hotpatching through Windows Update for Business or Intune. Microsoft describes the details and configuration steps in its updated guide to managing hotpatch updates. For Quick Machine Recovery, out-of-kernel AV and just-in-time admin elevation there is no public preview and nothing to install yet. I'd still use the time to look hard at your recovery strategy and your device provisioning flows:

In my consulting projects, keeping offline recovery images up to date and having a documented way into WinRE has paid off again and again. For high-risk endpoints in particular, the support team has to be able to start a WinRE-based repair.

You should also check which machines still have permanent local admins and whether you can cut that number now. Intune Endpoint Privilege Management already gives you just-in-time elevation, although not through the native experience Microsoft has just announced. If you still depend on default admin accounts, this is a good moment to rethink that. I described practical approaches in [/blog/intune-endpoint-privilege-management-local-admins].

Most of the initiative is still only on the roadmap

As of November 2024, most of what Microsoft presented under the Windows Resiliency Initiative is announcement only. Quick Machine Recovery is promised to Windows Insiders at some point in 2025. Whether it will hold up in real remote or BitLocker scenarios remains to be seen. Moving AV out of the kernel is a big architectural change, yet Microsoft hasn't published integration details or compatibility information, and there's no public preview. Native just-in-time admin elevation is on its way, but for now third-party and Intune-based tools are the only practical options. If you want to get rid of standing privileges, Intune Endpoint Privilege Management or a comparable product is what you can use until Windows ships its own.

Keep an eye on Microsoft's Windows security documentation as it changes, and start tightening your recovery and privilege management processes now. Too many organizations only find their gaps during the next outage.

Resiliency depends on process more than on new features

The Windows Resiliency Initiative is a welcome push, and frankly a late one, but features on their own won't make your environment resilient. CrowdStrike showed how fragile device recovery and local privilege management are in practice. If you only react to new features and never test your recovery procedures, you are setting yourself up for trouble. I'll follow Microsoft's progress closely, but no roadmap is a substitute for hardening your recovery, privilege and patching processes today.