The CIA Triad and Its Importance in Data Security (2024)

Security is a key consideration for any business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy. The CIA triad is a security model that consists of three vital information security principles: confidentiality, integrity and availability. This model is widely used by organizations to implement appropriate security controls and policies, which helps identify key problem areas and the necessary solutions to resolve these issues.

The CIA framework serves to outline the goals and objectives of the security program and helps organizations defend against threats such as data breaches/leaks, malware attacks, phishing, account/credentials compromise, web-based attacks, etc.

What Is the CIA Triad?

The letters in the triad stand for confidentiality, integrity and availability. These principles should apply to all data protected by the CIA triad. TechTarget explains the concepts of confidentiality, integrity and availability as:

Confidentiality measures are designed to prevent sensitive information from unauthorized access. Integrity is the ongoing maintenance of consistency, accuracy and reliability of data throughout its lifecycle. And availability ensures information should be consistently and readily accessible for authorized parties.

Understanding the Three Principles of the CIA Triad

Confidentiality: This principle addresses the need to protect sensitive, private information from unauthorized access. This may include, but is not limited to, financial records, business plans, personally identifiable information (PII) such as Social Security Number (SSN) or date of birth, password-protected records, email records, payment information (including credit/debit cards) and protected health records.

To protect the confidentiality of your organization’s data, you must segregate data based on the criticality of the information and set parameters to limit who can access certain types of information. This may also involve actively preventing unauthorized users from obtaining access.

Some of the methods used to manage data confidentiality include access control lists, role-based access control (RBAC), volume/file encryption, file permissions, encryption of data in process, in transit and in storage, remote wipe capabilities, and education and training for all individuals with access to protected data.

Integrity: This component of the CIA triad ensures the data is correct, authentic and reliable. In other words, it ensures that the data has not been tampered with and therefore can be trusted. Data must be protected while it is in use, in transit and when it is stored, regardless of whether it resides in a laptop, storage device, data center or in the cloud.

You must ensure your data is protected from both deletion and modification by an unauthorized party, and in such a way that when an authorized individual makes changes in error, those changes can be reversed.

Data integrity can be preserved through encryption, hashing, digital signature, digital certificate, intrusion detection systems, auditing, version control, authentication and access controls.

Availability: This principle ensures systems, applications and data are available and accessible to authorized users when they need them. Networks, systems and applications must be constantly up and running to ensure critical business processes are uninterrupted.

Availability of your data systems can be impacted by human error, hardware failure, software failure, network failure, power outages, natural disasters and cyberattacks.

Some of the methods used to ensure data and application availability include redundancy (servers, networks, applications and services), fault tolerance (hardware), regular software patching and system upgrades, maintaining backups and backup copies, and disaster recovery.

What Is the Most Important Part of the CIA Triad?

Depending on an organization’s security goals, industry, regulatory requirements or nature of their business, one of these principles may take priority over others. For example, in government agencies or financial institutions, integrity may take priority over confidentiality and availability. Data availability is critical in e-commerce and healthcare sectors. However, there may be a trade-off in prioritizing one of the principles over others.

What Is the Importance of the CIA Triad?

The CIA triad forms the core foundation for the development of security systems and policies for organizations. As such, the CIA triad plays a crucial role in keeping your data safe and secure against growing cyberthreats. When a security incident, such as data theft or a security breach occurs, it is deemed that an organization has been unsuccessful in appropriately implementing one or more of these principles. The CIA triad is vital to information security since it enhances security posture, helps organizations stay compliant with complex regulations and ensures business continuity.

What Is the Inverse of Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability?

The opposite of confidentiality, integrity and availability is disclosure, alteration and destruction.

• Disclosure – When an authorized party gets access to your information.
• Alteration – When data is modified or changed.
• Destruction – When data, systems or applications are destroyed or rendered inaccessible.

How Does Unitrends Help in Enhancing Data Security?

The ways in which threat actors are attacking the data across fragmented IT environments rely on failed backups and/or causing backups to fail, thereby increasing the efficacy of attacks and putting organizations at risk.

Traditional means of data protection fail to address the evolution of cyberattacks. As we’ve seen, there is a shift towards behavioral attacks that rely on social engineering such as phishing, Account Takeover (ATO), Business Email Compromise (BEC) and even behavioral changes in ransomware. Modern ransomware does not detonate and encrypt immediately. The gestation period is designed to give the malware time to spread as widely as possible from machine to machine, typically by using the permissions of the systems it has infected.

Unitrends Unified BCDR solutions are augmented with artificial intelligence and automation to address these challenges.

Confidentiality:

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Unitrends’ self-service role-based access control model enables you to restrict a user’s access at the appliance, asset and task level. Each user account is assigned a role that defines the types of operations the user can perform on the appliance. In addition, the “Manage Role” function can be further customized by applying an access level and other options.
• Volume and File Encryption: Our solutions give you the ability to enable or disable encryption on a per-client basis, modify passphrases as needed and ensure data remains encrypted from beginning to end for local or off-site backup copies.
• SSAE 16 Certified Tier 3 Cloud Data Centers: Our cloud data centers are SSAE 16 certified. The Unitrends Cloud is also compliant with Service Organization Control (SOC 2) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Integrity:

• Encryption: Our backup and recovery solutions use AES 256-bit encryption to secure and protect your sensitive data.
• Hashing:Unitrends uses an SHA-512 cryptographic hash function for tracking duplicate blocks during deduplication and offers multiple unique methods for maintaining hash references as data is deduplicated.
• Recovery Testing: Unitrends RecoveryAssurance automatically performs the highest level of applicationrecovery testingwith no IT time or effort. It fully restores applications, performs analytics, measuresrecoverytime andrecoverypoint, and identifies reasons why any recoveries failed.
• Reporting: Powered by Recovery Assurance technology, our solution enables you to automatically run a disaster recovery test to see reports and statistics revealing how an outage would impact business continuity and how much data your business might lose.
• Hardened Linux Backup Appliances: Unitrends backup appliances are built on a hardened Linux platform that is ransomware resistant, unlike weaker Windows-based backup.
• Immutable Cloud Storage for Backup Copy: Unitrends Cloud-empowered appliances provide an immutable backup copy by storing a copy of your backups in the cloud or on detached media (such as disk), that is separate and isolated from your production environment and network.

Availability:

• Self-Healing Backup: Unitrends Helix is an intelligent SaaS remediation platform, laser-focused on eliminating manual tasks such as troubleshooting environmental issues that impact backups. Helix is designed to identify and fix the most common backup problems without you having to lift a finger. Helix learns what conditions it should look for and how to fix them automatically.
• Instant Recovery: Unitrends Instant Recovery enables you to recover a failed or corrupted virtual machine or physical Windows server and access its full data set in just a few minutes.This means production data is accessible and your employees can continue working very quickly after an unexpected server failure. Faster recovery means less downtime and more productivity for your organization.
• Replicas: The VM replica feature provides a quick way to recover a failed VMware VM. It creates a virtual machine replica of the original VM and keeps the replica up to date by applying backups of the original VM as they run.

The Windows file-level replica feature (formerly known as Windows instant recovery) provides a quick way to recover a failed physical Windows asset. It creates a virtual machine replica of the Windows machine and keeps the replica up to date by applying backups of the original asset as they run.

• Replication and Hot Target Recovery: Hot Backup Copy (Replication) is an advanced feature of the Unitrends Enterprise Backup software. This enables off-site storage of mission-critical data to protect against data loss in the event of a disaster.
• Disaster Recovery as a Service: Unitrends offers hybrid cloud Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), a solution that is defined around each customer’s recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), to get your business back up and running quickly when disaster strikes. DRaaS eliminates the need to purchase and manage remote sites, infrastructure and personnel by providing a warm standby environment for your business in the secure Unitrends Cloud.

Want to see how Unitrends Unified BCDR can help enhance your data security posture? Request a demo today!