Enhancing Privacy and Security with Information Barriers (IB)

​Information Barriers is an effective way to ensure wrong information isn’t used by Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. Copilot only surfaces organizational data that users have minimum view permissions on. This is why it's important to use permission models available in Microsoft 365 services and Purview technology. Such as Information Barriers to completely block the access between certain user groups, helping ensure that the right user groups have the correct access to the appropriate content within your organization when using Copilot.
Imagine another scenario where you want to prevent communication between different schools. This helps to protect their privacy and ensures that their personal information is not exposed to potential threats or unauthorized individuals. By using this technology, schools can demonstrate their commitment to protecting student information and providing a secure learning environment for all. With the rise of privacy concerns and the need to protect student information, it becomes necessary to implement Information Barriers to prevent these younger students from being searchable or visible in the school's system. By utilizing this solution, the school district can ensure that only authorized personnel can access student email addresses.

Creating a secure environment with Information Barriers

​By implementing Purview Information Barriers, organizations that want to get a balance between technology-driven collaboration, privacy, and security. These barriers not only protect sensitive information but also foster a safe and secure the environment for the users.

​Understanding Information Barriers

It is crucial to understand the concepts underlying information barriers (IBs), to be able to use this solution in an effective and functional way.
In short, Information barriers are policies that block communication and sharing between what’s called segments in an organization. Segments are defined on user attributes for example the Entra ID attributes “Department”, “Job title” or “City”. The policy blocking is supported in these workloads: Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive.

Information Barriers policies can block these kinds of actions between segments:

IB uses policies to determine communication limits or restrictions between the segments. When defining IB policies, you can create two kinds of policies:

One-way blocking
For users defined in the “HR Segment”, the users and information in the “Day Trader Segment” won't be visible to users included in “HR Segment”. But the users in the “Day Trader Segment” will see users and information in the “HR Segment”

Two-way blocking
For users defined in both the “Marketing Segment” and the “Day Trader Segment” the users and information in each segment won't be visible to users included in the opposite segment.
Non-block
Simply no IB policy block and the users can communicate freely between the departments.

When IB policies are configured as above, this will be the outcome in Teams when searching for a user in a segment that is blocked.