IGEL is making Emergency Mode generally available as part of IGEL Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery. This allows administrators to centrally reboot entire fleets of Windows endpoints into IGEL OS from a single console. IT teams can still perform forensic investigations and recovery work.
In the event of a ransomware attack or a large-scale Windows outage, users’ work is often halted for days, even after the underlying data has long since been secured. IGEL’s Emergency Mode addresses precisely this gap.
From the Universal Management Suite (UMS), an administrator can restart a single device, a selected group, or the entire endpoint fleet in IGEL OS. Those devices then remain locked in IGEL OS until an administrator manually restores them to Windows. Users do not need to take any action themselves.
Windows partition remains intact
During such an event, the Windows partition is isolated and preserved for forensic and compliance investigations. Meanwhile, employees continue working on the same device and reconnect to authorized applications and resources. IGEL summarizes this approach as “reboot, reconnect, resume.”
“Organizations have invested heavily in the ability to quickly recover data and infrastructure, but few can recover user access at the endpoint just as quickly,” says Klaus Oestermann, CEO of IGEL. According to him, Emergency Mode closes that gap.
However, there is one important condition. Emergency Mode works exclusively on devices where IGEL OS Dual Boot is already installed and licensed. Endpoints without that preparation cannot use it. It is, therefore, a measure you must take in advance, not a lifeline after the fact.
With Emergency Mode, the company is explicitly targeting sectors where downtime has an immediate impact: healthcare, financial services, government, transportation, and critical infrastructure. According to IGEL, BC&DR complements existing investments in data resilience, security operations, and incident response, rather than replacing them.