How Do You Ensure Data Integrity?

As businesses increasingly become reliant on their data, so does the importance of securing that data. With increased automation in computer systems, often new guidance is needed on how to make sure these processes are correctly in place. Data integrity is essential to a successful business - it determines the security of your information and, as a result, the security of your business.

Information security safeguards businesses against practices like mining, processing, and selling information data to the highest bidder, releasing sensitive information, and competitive data leaks. Many of these aspects threaten to take down even the largest business.

This blog explores the best ways to ensure data integrity and how these processes make sure you protect your information and your business continuity.

What is information security?

The ready availability of the internet has meant that people have been accessing data they shouldn’t for years. Information security is the practice of protecting information and mitigating information and data risks. Typically, it involves preventing, or at the very least reducing, the probability of cyberattacks, unauthorised access, disclosure, disruptions, and deletion.

Information security is essentially about controlling processes. Companies that use enterprise content management platforms rely on various information security measures to ensure their data integrity remains intact. Without these measures, companies risk losing their reputation competitive advantage and making themselves vulnerable to attacks.

There are 6 main ways we suggest ensuring information security is a top priority.

6 ways to ensure data integrity

Perform risk-based validation

Risk-based validation is the process of ensuring protocols address data quality and reliability. In some cases, it’s cost-effective to have a system vendor in place to perform the qualification and validation of these protocols.

Risk-based validation accounts for all electronic data storage locations, including printouts and PDF reports during validation. This process ensures that your quality management system defines system validations' frequency, roles, and responsibilities.

Data quality and validation are essential to ensuring that you are not running the risk of corrupted or easily lost data. Essentially, putting a system like this in place means you can see where you are vulnerable and how you can update your storage solutions to protect your information better

Permissions management

Permissions management is a security measure that monitors and manages what data, features and content end-users have access to. Good permissions management ensures that company users only have access to data that they need for specific tasks.

Permissions management allows companies to have greater control over their data - boosting overall information security. This process means that companies can quickly pinpoint where they are vulnerable, how they are being attacked if this becomes an issue, and who the attacker may be. Permissions management brings forward the idea that only trusted end-users have access to sensitive information.

Audit your audit trails

An audit trail must be an unerasable record of all data in a system. This includes any changes that have been made to any databases or files. The audit trail must be able to answer: who, what, when and why?

Auditing your audit trails start with defining relevant data and ensuring it is included. Maintenance for the audit trail is done by assigning roles and scheduling tests for the audit trail functionality, ensuring you address issues before they become security risks.

Having a traceable record of all the data in the system and how it travels means that you can pinpoint vulnerable areas in your system and trace where issues stem from. This is essential to know how you can most effectively protect your data integrity.

Review and repair

We found that 89% of respondents in research done about data integrity had no way to define and detect errors easily. These companies relied heavily on manual methods or third parties to fix the issues.

Reviewing and repairing problems is integral to keeping your data security systems functional. Manual review and repair leave the company in danger of further attacks and abuse. As such, tools that give operators the option to locate security holes quickly, safely update bulk permissions and individually undo incorrect permissions are essential. Using these tools makes it less likely that the company will be vulnerable to more attacks and brings about a sense of safety in how quickly they will be identified.

Identifying issues and repairing them as quickly as possible means you spend less time leaving your information at risk. This directly leads to better data integrity and security.

Archive regularly

Make sure you backup and save electronic data on a pre-set schedule. Moreover, make sure that you have a secure location for this data. It is smart to retrieve this data during internal audits, making the process easier. Additionally, electronic archives should be validated, secured, and maintained in control during the data life cycle.

Archiving data and using auditing systems to help apply this process means that you can clear out data that is currently irrelevant but also make sure you have access to all previous practices within the company. This means that you can refer to any issues and identify existing issues, protecting your information.

Training and awareness

If the policies are ignored or misunderstood, they become ineffective. Training your staff and teaching them about awareness of these policies is vital to the success of your data security process implementation.

This is particularly necessary after you put new regulations in place. Suppose your staff is unaware of your policies or how to abide by them in their given departments. In that case, this disrupts workflow and means they don’t know their role in protecting your information - further making you vulnerable to attacks.

Protect your information

Information security is a major concern for companies and will continue to be a pillar of success for businesses. However, not every business has the time or money to implement these pillars in time and run the risk of information leaks that could stop their development seemingly overnight. The key to protecting your information effectively is to find a partner who can show you the way to better and more efficient practices.

Fastman can help with these practices and has the tools that you need to implement them to the maximum effect. We’ve helped many companies like yours find security and peace of mind by ensuring their data integrity. Fastman can help you secure your business continuity and help you achieve your data management goals - all you must do is contact us today to find out how.