Implement Tools, Processes, and Policies to Ensure Data Integrity

The responsibility for data integrity resides in the hands of both business and information technology personnel. Business users should determine functional security requirements, and IT should provide the mechanisms that guarantee that this requirement is met. It is the primary responsibility of IT to safeguard all data under its control.

The principles of systems management will ensure that all data are protected against corruption and loss by proving a mechanism to backup and restore data to an intact state after a system failure. Good backup and recovery strategies are mandatory so that data can be recovered in a timely manner regardless of the cause of loss. Systems management may also require reserving a portion of bandwidth between locations or even providing redundant connections to support replication in a disaster recovery environment. If the replicated/distributed data are mission-critical, it becomes important to make sure the data architecture considers performance and survivability under normal circumstances, as well as within degraded operations. In the latter situation, it may be necessary to record the flow of data across tiers (e.g., breadcrumbs).