Your Guide to the CIA Triad (AKA The 3 Pillars of Cybersecurity)

Want to hear a secret? Despite all the buzzwords and jargon, cybersecurity has a pretty simple foundation… one that many professionals refer to as the CIA Triad (unrelated to the intelligence agency). Its three pillars—Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability—serve as the three critical sides of the cybersecurity triangle. If any fail, the whole of your systems are at risk.

Let’s go over what makes up each side.

Confidentiality

Prioritizing Data Privacy within Your Business

Is access to the sensitive information your business stores restricted to only those who actively need it to perform their tasks? As cliché as it sounds, access to your business’ data needs to be restricted on a need-to-know basis.

Nowadays, however, AI-propelled attacks and scams are making this more challenging than ever to maintain.

This makes it all the more essential that we all maintain the appropriate measures to keep our data secure. Things like data-scrambling encryption and the identity double-check offered by multi-factor authentication are even more important to utilize. You want your data to be accessible only to those who need to see it for their official tasks.

Integrity

Confidence That Your Data is Accurate and Trustworthy

I’m sure you’d prefer to know that your business’ operational data is present and (critically) correct. This is why integrity is critical to your security as well. Just imagine the potential fallout if your payroll checks or invoice payments had their decimal points shifted left or right by a single space… I’m sure your team wouldn’t appreciate being paid a tenth of what they were owed and your vendors wouldn’t appreciate having to account for ten times the cash flow as compared to the services they rendered.

Sure, the data is still private, but it isn’t okay that it is also incredibly wrong. This is why digital signatures and versioning are critical to your security… they allow you to look back and see who changed a file and when they did so.

Availability

Ensuring Your Systems are There When You Need Them to Be

Let’s say you’ve built your business around the ideal team. All your bases are covered, and they have all been cross-trained to account for any gaps an absence might cause. Your data policies control their access based on their immediate needs. Unfortunately, all of that would be for nothing if a Denial of Service attack or another issue cut these preparations short. This is one key reason backups and disaster recovery strategies are so critical to operational security: they keep things moving, even in the worst-case scenario.

Your Cybersecurity Depends on All Three Holding Their Weight

There’s a reason a triangle is called the strongest shape. If properly built, it naturally distributes any incoming force equally amongst itself, preventing any one point from being overwhelmed. Your cybersecurity needs to balance confidentiality, integrity, and availability; focusing too much on any one aspect means you neglect the others.

We’re here to help you strike this balance in your business. Give us a call at (501) 375-1111 to learn more.