Microsoft’s SCI documentation explains that Information Barriers (part of Microsoft Purview and enforced across Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange) are used to “restrict communication and collaboration between specific groups of users to avoid conflicts of interest or to comply with regulatory obligations.” Policies define which segments can communicate and which must be blocked, and they control chat, channel conversations, meetings, file sharing, and e-discovery visibility between the defined segments. Typical scenarios include preventing communication between investment banking and research, or between merger deal teams and the rest of the organization. This is fundamentally different from other features: Sensitivity label policies classify and protect content but do not block who can talk to whom; Customer Lockbox manages Microsoft engineer access to customer data during support; and Privileged Access Management (PAM) limits admin task approvals and elevated operations, not end-user communication. When the requirement is to “restrict communication and the sharing of information between members of two departments,” Microsoft prescribes Information Barriers as the purpose-built capability to enforce those restrictions across collaboration workloads.