We have a new hire who will be working from overseas long term. He will be carrying a Win 10 laptop with construction-related design software on it. He'll be manually backing up his critical files to Google Drive.

I'm looking at options for setting up a copy of the machine in the cloud, in case of a disaster that requires him to buy a new laptop while away. What I'm hoping is that I can take his fully-configured laptop, make a copy of it, upload it, and have it ready to go in case of emergency. In such an event, he'd use the new laptop to connect to the cloud-hosted machine via RDP. Ideally it would be something that just sits there not running, at little to no cost, until needed. Chances are it won't ever even be used, but I want to be prepared for the worst.

It looks like MS Azure's pay-as-you-go may be a good fit, but I've only spent a few minutes researching, so far. Any suggestions?

Edit: Unfortunately, I have very limited time to do this, so easy of setup is a big factor.