In a digital age where data drives decisions, ensuring your data remains intact and uncorrupted is essential for your organisation’s success. But while often conflated, it’s important to distinguish between data integrity and data security.
Data security is all about safeguarding sensitive information from unauthorised access. Data integrity focuses on maintaining the accuracy and consistency of your data throughout its lifecycle. Essentially, data integrity ensures that your data is trustworthy, whether it’s in transit across systems or at rest in storage.
To have integrity, data has to be:
- Accessible: Data needs to be easily accessed in the right places, at the right time.
- Traceable: Each touchpoint needs to be tracked accurately so that you can identify any red flags early.
- Reliable: Data has to be accurate and consistent in order to report on company goals.
Given that businesses increasingly rely on data for decision-making, ensuring data integrity is non-negotiable. However, Gartner estimates that poor data quality—a component of data integrity—costs businesses $12.9 million each year, while another report reveals that 80% of executives believe that only 60% of their business data at most is usable.
So, how do you improve data integrity?
To achieve data integrity, you need to reduce the risk of:
- Human error
- Errors made during the transfer of data from one system to another
- Misconfigurations and security errors
- Threats caused by malicious intent (e.g., disgruntled staff, malware and cyber attacks)
- Compromised hardware.
Here are some steps you can take to improve data integrity:
1. Validate data and input
Data coming into your systems—whether from external or internal sources—must be validated to ensure its authenticity and accuracy. Verification should take place at every entry point, whether it's a user interacting with an application or an API transferring data from one system to another. The challenge is to confirm that the data is coming from a legitimate source and hasn't been tampered with during the transmission process. Using multi-factor authentication (MFA) and encryption techniques helps mitigate the risks associated with unauthorised data manipulation and improves your company’s data integrity.
2. Remove duplicates
Duplicate or outdated data creates confusion and opens up the possibility of errors in analysis. By regularly identifying and removing duplicate entries, you help to maintain a clean and reliable dataset. The presence of multiple versions of the same data increases the chance of using outdated or inaccurate information, which can affect decision-making. For businesses of all sizes, using data cleaning tools or software that automates this process ensures data consistency and improves operational efficiency.
3. Regularly back up your data
Backing up your data is critical in ensuring its recovery in case of a breach, system failure, or natural disaster. Regularly scheduled backups, stored securely in both on-site and off-site locations, help safeguard against data corruption or loss while maintaining integrity. However, cybercriminals often target backup systems, so encryption is a must to prevent them from compromising sensitive data.
4. Control access
Data access should be restricted based on roles and permissions to prevent tampering or unauthorised alterations. Ensuring that only authorised personnel can access sensitive data is essential for maintaining its integrity. Implementing role-based access control (RBAC) helps minimise the risk of human error or malicious tampering. In addition, limiting physical access to servers or data storage devices—such as ensuring that servers are physically secured and not easily accessible—adds another layer of protection against tampering.
5. Establish and maintain clear audit trails
Audit trails are crucial for tracking and verifying the integrity of data. These logs automatically record who accessed the data, when, and what changes were made. An effective audit trail should be tamper-proof, time-stamped, and detailed enough to offer full traceability of each event. Regularly reviewing audit logs can help detect suspicious activity early, enabling swift action to protect data integrity. Additionally, having clear audit trails is invaluable when investigating potential breaches or compliance issues.
6. Audit vendors
Since many organisations rely on third-party vendors for data storage or processing, auditing these vendors regularly is vital. Vendors need to demonstrate how they validate and protect data to ensure it remains trustworthy. Regular checks ensure that their security measures align with your organisation's standards, minimising the risks of compromised data. This is particularly important when vendors have access to sensitive customer data or financial information.
7. Invest in employee training and awareness
Human error is a leading cause of data integrity failures. Regular employee training on the importance of data integrity, security best practices, and how to recognise phishing attacks can significantly reduce the risk of compromised data. Moreover, integrating security protocols into daily operations helps ensure that employees follow the correct procedures when handling data, especially when transferring or updating records.
Every organisation is a potential target for cybercriminals. Business leaders must be alert to the current threats in order to protect their company from attack. Read our guide to learn everything you need to know about business cybersecurity and securing your business data.
