The Essential Pillars of Data Protection

How do you know if your data is safe? What does it mean to “protect” your data? Is there some sort of test that you can use to tell if your data is truly protected?

These are some of the questions that we wanted to answer — at a very broad level — in this article.

We’ve come up with 3 basic “pillars” that we’d felt any data protection plan should try to cover in order for data to be considered “truly protected”. These are 3 tests that any solid data protection plan should easily be able to pass.

Integrity

First, you need to protect the integrity of your data.

Data integrity can come in many forms. Of course, protecting files from deletion in the event of user error or hardware failure is important.

But integrity means ensuring that the data being protected does not change without authorization. For example, a virus could potentially modify the contents of a file. And data integrity means ensuring that the appropriate version of this data can be brought.

Security

Security and confidentiality of data are also important.

Although this might not seem like a data loss problem, the value and utility of confidential data is dramatically affected in a negative way once it is exposed.

For example, the value of a reporter’s work is highly dependent on their ability to protect their sources. Likewise, the ability to keep patient data confidential affects how well this data can be used to provide effective patient care.

Accessibility

The third pillar is the accessibility of your data. This pillar has grown in importance with the growth of online business and social media. When servers fail, companies now have much less tolerance for unplanned downtime.

Unplanned downtime can have negative effects on companies which can include things such as lost sales, soiled reputation and even legal liability.

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