What is data integrity?

Data integrity refers to the information stored in any type of database or data center that is accurate, complete, consistent, and reliable, no matter how long it is stored or how often it is accessed. Maintaining data integrity means ensuring data remains intact, searchable, and recoverable over the course of its lifecycle. It is the job of data protection solutions to ensure data integrity by protecting sensitive and business-critical information from external and internal threats. 

Incorrect or poor-quality data will always produce faulty output – making it worthless. Today’s businesses need accurate, complete, and reliable data to make accurate, complete, and reliable business decisions.  Data integrity guarantees that data can be tracked back to its original source to provide authentication.

Data integrity can be compromised in a variety of ways, including:

1. Accidental human errors
2. Malicious insider attacks
3. Any external cyberattack, including email fraud, identify fraud, and ransomware attacks as examples
4. Data transfer errors
5. Compromised hardware, such as a disk crash
6. Software corruption

There are a variety of technologies that help you ensure data integrity.

Data encryption encodes data, in transit and in rest, using enterprise-grade AES-256 encryption, helping to protect data from unauthorized access. Multi-factor authentication eliminates the possibility of unauthorized access by requiring two or more independent pieces of evidence to verify the identify of any user that requests access to an application, service, file, or document.  Policy and access controls prevent unauthorized users to access, edit, delete, and modify data, files, and documents.  Audit logs and trials provide transparency regarding all transactions and user interactions, including what users are doing, what kind of documents they are accessing, and with whom they share files and documents. Backups protect data integrity by ensuring a business has copies of their data in the event primary data is compromised. Blockchain is an append-only, distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of records that are secured from tampering and revision. With blockchain-based data notarization, users have a clear, public, immutable way to prove that the data they are using is original and unchanged – ensuring the integrity of the data.   

Next-generation anti-malware with AI-based static and behaviour detection combined with exploit prevention and URL filtering to counter known and unknown threats, including zero-day attacks. 

Acronis Cyber Notary Cloud is a service that is part of Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, which is a one-of-a-kind solution that detects and prevents advanced malware, offers remediation and investigation capabilities, and provides total protection of your clients’ data. It unites behavioral and signature-based anti-malware, endpoint protection management, backup, and disaster recovery in one solution.

Acronis Cyber Notary Cloud is an innovative service based on blockchain technology. It adds an extra level of confidence to the authenticity of your clients’ personal and business data if you clients need to:

• Reassure themselves that a file previously stored or backed up has remained unchanged
• Confirm that a file is authentic and unchanged from its backup

Property records, court documents, and long-term archives that could be subject to legal or tax audits are some common examples of files or documents that require authentication. 

Acronis Cyber Notary Cloud is the universal solution for timestamping and fingerprinting any data objects and streams. Since it is impractical to store big chunks of data in a blockchain, Acronis will only send file/backup hashes to the Acronis Cyber Notary Cloud service. See Figure 1. 

Acronis Cyber Notary Cloud protects any data against tampering and deletion because data immutability is algorithmically protected by blockchain technology and can be independently verified.