Disaster Recovery Planning for Teams

[ChristopherLaney]

I am reaching out to get feedback and insight on a situation posed by our company while planning migration to Teams and Office 365.  The question being raised revolves around any situation where our primary locations lose external internet access.  At this point we have migrated all users to exchange online and are in the final stages of decommissioning our on premise exchange servers.  Next steps are to migrate our users up to Teams then decommission our on premise Lync 2013 server.  What I want to ask the community is this: Is there any way that we can configure a Skype for business 2019 server that would allow us to continue using teams (or skype if needed) internally in the scenario where external internet is down.

[#2]

No! Technically you can run on premises Skype for business alongside teams in island mode but if you are migrating users to teams all together there’s no way to use this without access to internet! You can sync files for offline access but regarding chat, no!
Dual wan connections?

[#3]

@ChristopherLaney  I completely agree with Adam. There's no on-premises version of Teams that you could fall back to. Once you go all-in for Teams, the accounts are homed in Office 365, so you wouldn't be able to flip right over to the local Skype server. 

I don't know what your mobile usage is like, but the Teams mobile client is nearly full fidelity with the desktop client, so your users wouldn't be completely without the ability to take calls, chat, have meetings, collaborate, etc. 

[#4]

Good point! If users are using Teams via mobile also, they have the chat functionality and most other things at hand via cell network too!

Adam

[#5]

I agree to your points, the thought being a plan for natural disaster where all outside communication is not viable, internet, cellular, potentially even telephones and we are running on backup power.  I get the likely hood of such an event but all the same it is the scenario we were posed to offer a solution for.

[#6]

In that scenario, you won't have access to EXO, SPO or any other O365 Service, including Teams.
To plan for this, you could identify key SPO document libraries and have them synced to machines so that you had the desired content, i.e, DR response plans :)
Communication would need to occur via voice and pencil/paper :)