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Requirements: Confidentiality

Confidentiality, a core pillar of the CIA triad, ensures that sensitive information is accessible only to authorized individuals and stays protected from unauthorized exposure. A single breach can trigger legal liability, customer notification requirements, and significant financial and reputational damage.

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About this video

Confidentiality is one of the three foundational principles of the CIA triad, alongside integrity and availability. At its core, confidentiality means that information is accessible only to those who are authorized to access it — a principle that applies across all forms of data transmission, whether over internal networks, wireless infrastructure, or the public internet. The goal is straightforward: prevent unauthorized parties from intercepting, reading, or exploiting data that was never intended for them. The real-world stakes of confidentiality failures are significant and far-reaching. When sensitive data — such as proprietary business plans or customer records — is exposed to an unauthorized party, the damage rarely stays contained. Organizations face mandatory breach notifications, regulatory scrutiny, legal liability, and the cost of remediation services, all triggered by what may have been a single point of failure. Unlike other types of security incidents, a confidentiality breach is often irreversible; once data leaves authorized control, it cannot be fully recalled or guaranteed to remain unexploited. For these reasons, confidentiality must be treated as a design requirement rather than an afterthought. Every system, service, or network rollout should be evaluated against the sensitivity of the data it will carry, with appropriate protections built in from the start. The cascading consequences of even minor exposure make confidentiality one of the most critical security properties to implement and maintain across any organization's infrastructure.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Confidentiality in Security

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.
Data Exfiltration
The unauthorized transfer of data from a system to an external destination.
Encryption
The process of converting readable data into an unreadable format using an algorithm and key to prevent unauthorized access.
Sensitive Data
Information that must be protected from unauthorized access due to its private, confidential, or regulated nature, such as customer records or proprietary business plans.

Topics

Confidentiality Cia Triad Data Protection Information Security Unauthorized Access Cybersecurity

Transcript

Let's take a real quick look into confidentiality and what confidentiality means from a security perspective.

Confidentiality is one of the core aspects of the CIA triad. Confidentiality is not specific to technology; the word just means the state of being kept private. When it comes to technology, it just means that somebody who shouldn't see information doesn't see that information, that it's kept confidential, that only the people that are allowed to or should see that information are the ones who do see that information.

An example

Let's say Susan is sending a message to David here. We don't want somebody, some sort of adversary in between, being able to capture that information and read that information. This could have some sort of sensitive information. Maybe it's like the next plans that are going to really make our company skyrocket, and we don't want that to be out there in the rest of the world. Or maybe it's got some customer data in it, and this is another company that's going to steal that data and market to those customers. Or maybe it's got some private information from our customers, so if somebody were to be able to see that information, we would have to notify our customers: yeah, we lost your information, and there was somebody that was able to take and steal that information.

This is not something that we want to have happen. We want to make sure that there are certain pieces of information within the company that we need to remain secure and confidential. So as we're rolling out new services, or rolling out wireless LAN networks, or maybe we're rolling out a whole network altogether, or communicating across the internet, we want to make sure there's a certain level of confidentiality. Whatever we're designing, we need to make sure that there's the level of confidentiality we need for the information that's being sent.

Why it matters so much

I find that confidentiality is one of the most critical security components that you need to implement on your systems, especially if you have any kind of sensitive data. The reason is because if that data gets exposed to the outside world, then you never know. You can never fully retrieve it back, and it can cause a lot of harm.

That just one little incident, where just some customer data gets stolen, means that now you have to notify your customers. There's legal action that happens. There are services that you've got to pay for to clean all this up. And it causes this cascade of events that can be very costly, just for a little bit of exposure with this. So confidentiality is one of the most critical things that you need to implement on your network.

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