What is a use case for implementing information barrier policies in Microsoft 365?

Microsoft 365 Information Barriers are compliance policies used “to prevent certain segments of users from communicating or collaborating with each other.” In Microsoft’s guidance, IB policies are designed for scenarios like insider trading restrictions, M&A deal rooms, or research–sales separation, where it’s necessary to block chats, calls, and collaboration between defined user segments. The documentation explains that when IB policies are in place, “users in the blocked segments cannot search, discover, or communicate with each other in Microsoft Teams,” and IB v2 extends these controls to additional collaboration workloads such as SharePoint and OneDrive. By contrast, email restrictions in Exchange Online are addressed through mail flow rules or other Exchange features, not information barriers, and restricting unauthenticated access or external sharing is handled by identity access controls and sharing settings, not IB. Therefore, the specific use case is restricting Microsoft Teams chats (and related collaboration) between certain groups within an organization.