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Keeping Data Safe

The CIA triad—confidentiality, integrity, and availability—forms the foundation of data security, defining the three core properties organizations must protect. This content introduces each principle and common technical controls used to uphold them.

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About this video

The CIA triad is the cornerstone model of information security, establishing three essential properties that must be maintained to protect data and systems: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Rather than a checklist, the triad serves as a lens through which security decisions are evaluated, helping professionals identify what is at risk and what controls are appropriate. Confidentiality refers to keeping data visible only to those who are authorized to access it. Sensitive information such as passwords and financial credentials must be protected from unauthorized disclosure, and controls like encryption and access management are common tools used to enforce this property. Integrity, on the other hand, is concerned with the accuracy and trustworthiness of data, ensuring it has not been tampered with or corrupted. Hashing algorithms and parity bits are examples of technical mechanisms used to verify and preserve data integrity. Availability ensures that data and services remain accessible to authorized users when they are needed. This is achieved through practices such as redundancy and maintaining secondary copies of data, so that a hardware failure or other disruption does not result in loss of access. Understanding all three properties together allows security professionals to build more complete and balanced defenses, addressing not just one risk but the full spectrum of threats that data and systems face.

What you'll learn

What's covered

CIA Triad & Data Security

Aligned to

CompTIA Tech+
6.1 Summarize confidentiality, integrity, and availability concerns.
6.6 Explain common uses of encryption.
6.7 Explain business continuity concepts.
CompTIA Server+
3.1 Summarize data security concepts.
CompTIA A+ Core 2
2.1 Summarize various security measures and their purposes.

Key terms

CIA Triad
The three core principles of information security: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.
Confidentiality
The principle that information is accessible only to those authorized to access it.
Integrity
The assurance that data has not been tampered with and remains accurate and complete.
Availability
The assurance that systems and data are accessible and operational when needed by authorized users.
Encryption
The process of converting readable data into an unreadable format using an algorithm and key to prevent unauthorized access.
Access Control
A security mechanism that restricts access to resources based on policies, roles, or identity.
Hash Function
A mathematical algorithm that converts input data of any size into a fixed-size output value used to verify data integrity.
Redundancy
The duplication of critical components or systems to increase reliability and availability.
Data Integrity
The assurance that data has not been altered or corrupted during storage or transmission.

Topics

Cia Triad Data Security Encryption Hashing Redundancy Cybersecurity

Transcript

What I Care About With Data

When it comes to data, there's certain things I'm concerned about. For instance, when I need certain data, I need to make sure that it's available to me. An example might be a rewards number: maybe I have a reward account that has some sort of number attached to it that I need to use to get discounts. Maybe it's at a coffee shop, maybe it's at a grocery store, maybe it's somewhere that I shop, and I have this rewards number. I want to make sure it's available to me when I need it, so I can get that discount.

There's other data I'm also concerned with making sure remains hidden, that there's not the wrong people that can see it. For instance, my passwords — maybe it's a password to log into a bank account. I certainly don't want that to get out and for others to see that.

The other thing that I need to be concerned about, possibly, is the accuracy of it. Maybe it's some sort of financial records, or some sort of data that I have that I make decisions off of. I want to make sure that that data — financial records would be a good example of this — is accurate and unchanged, that is, not going to just magically change as things go along, that there's a certain amount of what we call integrity with that.

The CIA Triad

Each one of these has a name attached to it. That accuracy, or making sure that it's unchanged, the name for that is integrity. If we are talking about making sure things are hidden, we call that confidentiality. And if we want to make sure things are available to us, we call that availability.

In fact, these terms are so prevalent when it comes to data safety, or what we call security, and even other realms of security, that we have this model called the CIA triad. It's what we use to make sure that we're maintaining a certain amount of confidentiality, integrity and availability of our services, our data, or other realms where we want to make sure we're maintaining a certain level of security. This gives us perspective on how we're going to protect our data.

Ways to Protect Data

There are different ways, and once again, this is not a real in-depth list of different ways that we can keep our data safe, but here are a few examples. With confidentiality, maybe we are practising some sort of access control or encryption on that data. For integrity, maybe we're using a hashing algorithm, or using some sort of parity bits — there are other ways that we can keep integrity. We also have availability, and we're doing things like keeping things redundant, so if something fails then we have a secondary copy of that data, so we keep it available.

So what we're going to do is start exploring different ways that we can maintain availability, confidentiality and integrity.

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