Information Barriers v2 is now generally available for all new onboarding customers

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Microsoft Purview Information Barriers v2 (IB v2) is now generally available for all new onboarding customers. IB v2 has enhanced architecture which enables the following new features:

• Large-scale segment support: The segment limit in organizations has increased to 5,000.
• Multi-segment support: Users can be assigned to up to 10 segments.
• Flexible user discoverability: Organizations can now choose to allow IB-protected users to discover each other while adhering to IB communication and collaboration policies.

What is Information Barriers?

Microsoft Purview Information Barriers (IB) is a comprehensive compliance platform that allows regulated customers in finance (FSI), legal, consulting verticals to meet compliance requirements to 'protect communication and collaboration across internal regulated users'. IB was first released for Microsoft Teams in 2019. Since the initial release, IB has expanded from Teams to also support OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online.

New capabilities with IB v2

Large-scale segment support

A big improvement with IB v2 is  large scale segment support per tenant. For IB v1, the maximum number of defined segments in a tenant was 250. With IB v2, this limit is increased to 5,000 segments per tenant. This new scale doesn’t require any extra IB configuration changes by organizations using IB v2. 

Multi-segment support

The new multi-segment organization mode enables administrators to assign users in your organization to up to 10 segments in IB, instead of being limited to just one segment. This allows support for more diverse communication rules between users and groups and supports more complex organizational and operational scenarios. For more information, see Use multi-segment support in information barriers.

Figure 1: Enable multiple segment support for your organization

Flexible user discoverability

IB v2 now allows administrators to enable or disable user discoverability restrictions in IB. Once user discoverability restricted by IB is turned off, users can discover each other in the people picker, independent of their IB policies.

By default, the people picker restriction is enabled for all IB policies. For example, IB policies that block two users from communicating with each other also restrict these users from seeing each other when using the people picker. Administrators can now choose to disable the user discoverability restriction using Security & Compliance Center PowerShell cmdlet Set-PolicyConfig. For more information, see Manage information barriers policies.

Figure 2: Disable user discoverability restriction by IB

Upgrading to IB v2

Organizations using IB v1 will be eligible to upgrade to IB v2 in the future. For more information about the IB v2 upgrade timeline, see the information barriers roadmap.

Eric Li

Nikita Bandyopadhyay

Microsoft IB v-team