⤷ Leadership Inspired by ⤶

CIA

⤷ Leadership Inspired by ⤶

CIA

About CIA

What is CIA

The CIA triad stands for Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. It's a fundamental concept in information security that helps ensure the security of your systems and data. By considering the CIA triad in your information systems, you can establish a robust security foundation that balances confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability

Confidentiality

Confidentiality refers to protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access, change, or otherwise use data. It involves implementing measures like encryption, access controls, and secure communication channels.

Integrity

Integrity focuses on maintaining the accuracy, consistency, and trustworthiness of your data and systems. It helps prevent unauthorized modifications, tampering, or corruption, ensuring that your information remains reliable and untampered.

Availability

Availability ensures that your information and systems are accessible and operational when needed. Measures such as redundant systems, backups, and disaster recovery plans are put in place to minimize downtime and ensure business continuity.
CIA Triad

The CIA Triad in Enterprise Security

At its core, the CIA trinity is a security architecture that you can—and should—use to safeguard information stored on-premises or in the cloud. It can help you with:

➾ Keep information secret (Confidentiality)
➾ Maintain the expected, accurate state of that information (Integrity)
➾ Ensure your information and services are up and running (Availability)

It's a balancing act: no security team can guarantee that confidentiality, integrity, and availability will never be compromised, regardless of the cause.

Threat-icon

Threat

A new incident with potential to harm a system
Vulnerability-icon

Vulnerability

Known weakness that hackers could exploit
Risk-icon

Risk

The potential for damage when a threat exploits a vulnerability

CIA Triad in Action

You'll know your security team is providing some protection for the CIA trio when you observe something like:

➾ Administrator rights are restricted.
➾ Inability to use unfamiliar devices
➾ The use of a VPN to get access to sensitive company information

Your security team should secure anything that is an asset, whether it is tangible hardware and software or intangible knowledge and skill. And that is the job of the security team: to safeguard any item deemed valuable by the firm. And it's evident that this is not a simple task.