Data Security, Integrity, and Protection

This chapter provides a high-level overview of data security, integrity, and protection. The relationship between information and data is typically perceived in a hierarchical, one-to-many context. Information is often construed as a composite entity, comprising multiple data elements that may have various formats and be spread across various mediums. Data, in its fundamental form, represents raw facts or figures, which, when processed or organized, yield information—a more meaningful and contextually enriched entity. In this chapter, we adopt a nontraditional approach by collapsing this conventional hierarchy. To simplify the discourse, we treat “data” and “information” as synonymous terms, disregarding the customary distinction that information is an aggregation or interpretation of data.