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Maintaining Data Integrity

Data integrity is the process of maintaining accurate and consistent data throughout its lifecycle. It ensures data reliability and prevents changes during modification, transfer, or deletion. Common reasons for losing integrity are human errors, transfer errors, cyber threats, security issues, and hardware problems. Steps to maintain integrity include validating input data, access controls, audit trails, backups, security practices, and workforce education.

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Jawad Ahmad
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8 views

Maintaining Data Integrity

Data integrity is the process of maintaining accurate and consistent data throughout its lifecycle. It ensures data reliability and prevents changes during modification, transfer, or deletion. Common reasons for losing integrity are human errors, transfer errors, cyber threats, security issues, and hardware problems. Steps to maintain integrity include validating input data, access controls, audit trails, backups, security practices, and workforce education.

Uploaded by

Jawad Ahmad
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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What Is Data Integrity?

Data integrity is the process of maintaining and assuring the accuracy and consistency of data
throughout the data lifecycle. The idea is to ensure your data is reliable, accurate, stored in the best
way possible, and does not change when you modify, transfer, or delete it.
We can split data integrity into two parts:
 Physical Data Integrity: deals with how we store and access data in our organization).
Ensuring the physical security of devices and having a disaster recovery plan are our major
concerns in this part.
 Logical Data Integrity: is all about preventing human error to prevent the loss of data
integrity.
Why Is Data Integrity Essential?
Organizations are heavily relying on data and analytics for making crucial business decisions these
days. Now imagine how a business decision based on data that is unreliable and inaccurate will
impact your organization.
In simple words, data integrity is always the best choice to maintain the quality of data throughout
your organization. It can save you from a lot of trouble.
Common Reasons behind the Loss of Data Integrity
1. Human Errors: Data is unavailable because it was accidentally deleted, wrong data entry,
or incomplete because of the negligence of your employees. While sometimes these errors
are unintentional, there are times when there is malicious intent behind them.
2. Transfer Errors: This could be a data transfer to a wrong address or compromise when
the file was being transferred between two devices. As a result, data is no longer of any use
to your organization.
3. Cyber Threats: Examples would be bugs, spam, malware, and other cyber threats that are
targeted at your organization to breach your data integrity.
4. Security Issues: This includes security loopholes that can be exploited by cyber terrorists
to breach your system and compromise your data integrity.
5. Hardware or Infrastructure Issues: This can be outdated hardware, physical
compromise to devices, or infrastructure in which little attention is paid towards security.
How to Know if your Data Has Integrity
Following are some aspects from which you can determine the integrity of your data:
 Availability: Your data is available whenever you need it, and wherever you need it.
 Integrity: Your data was recorded as it was observed, and at the time it was executed.
 Reliability: Your data is accurate, free from errors, and adheres to protocols. You can
blindly trust it for making crucial business decisions.
 Comprehensibility: Your data is easily accessible, comprehensible, and permanently
recorded.
 Originality: All the original entries of your data have been preserved, and you can access
them when you need them.
 Transparency: Your data clearly demonstrates when it was created and stored, who
created and stored it, and what the data is all about.
The Steps for maintaining Data Integrity are:
1. Always Validate Input Data
2. Implement Access Controls
3. Keep an Audit Trail
4. Always Backup Data
5. Adopting Security Best Practices
6. Educate your Workforce
1. Always Validate Input Data:
 Implement thorough validation processes for input data to ensure correctness and utility.
 Validate data from various sources, including end-users, internal systems, and external
sources.
2. Implement Access Controls:
 Regulate access to data through a least privileged security model.
 Grant access on a need-to-know basis, isolating data to minimize unauthorized access.
3. Keep an Audit Trail:
 Maintain an automated audit trail that tracks data changes and events.
 Enable tracking of create, delete, update actions along with timestamps and user
information.
4. Always Backup Data:
 Establish regular, reliable, and timely data backup processes.
 Safeguard against permanent data loss due to hardware failure, software bugs, or cyber
threats.
5. Adopting Security Best Practices:
 Regularly check and enhance the security of systems containing data.
6. Educate your Workforce:
 Train employees to follow data integrity guidelines to ensure consistency and reliability.
Factors Affecting Data Integrity:
 Errors due to human mistakes, transfer errors, bugs, viruses, and compromised hardware
can impact data integrity.
 Limiting data access, validating data, maintaining logs, conducting internal audits, and
using error-detection software can mitigate risks.
Steps to Reduce Data Integrity Risks:
 Limit data access, modify permissions to prevent unauthorized changes, validate data at
collection and usage, use logs for tracking, conduct internal audits, and employ error-
detection software.

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