The CIA Triad Working Together

Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability – known as the CIA Triad – are the three fundamental pillars of information security. Understanding how they work together is crucial because focusing on just one or two while neglecting the third creates vulnerabilities and practical problems. These elements must work in harmony, and security decisions often involve trade-offs between them.

When the Balance Goes Wrong

Data that's highly Available but not Confidential might be exposed to unauthorized users. Imagine placing all your or your business's files in a public cloud folder with no access controls so that you have easy access. Availability is excellent, but now wages information, customer lists, and trade secrets are exposed to competitors or the public. By sacrificing Confidentiality for convenience everyone now knows your secrets.

Data that's Available but lacks Integrity can't be trusted for decision-making or any other purpose. Consider a financial spreadsheet that's easily accessible but contains corrupted formulas or altered values. Everyone can open it, and perhaps only authorized people can modify it, but the numbers are wrong. Decisions based on the flawed data – budget allocations, investments, or pricing – could be disasterous. Without Integrity, available data becomes worse than no data because you don't know it's wrong.

Data that's Confidential and accurate but unavailable can't fulfill its purpose. Picture emergency contact information stored in an encrypted file on an offline server. The data is perfectly private and accurate, but when you desperately need the emergency phone numbers during a crisis and you can't access them - they're worthless. Protecting essential data so thoroughly that it became useless is unwise and damaging in it's own way.

Context Matters: Different Data Needs Different Balances

Even within a single business, different types of data require different balances to achieve data protection. Examples of this include:

Public marketing materials need low Confidentiality (meant to be public), high Integrity (incorrect information damages reputation), and high Availability (must reach potential customers).
Employee wages information requires very high Confidentiality (privacy and legal requirements) and very high Integrity (must be accurate).
Customer transaction databases need very high levels of all three: Confidentiality (regulatory requirements), Integrity (financial accuracy is critical), and Availability (customers expect real-time access).

Making the Right Trade-offs

To determine the appropriate balance, ask:

For Confidentiality: What would happen if unauthorized people accessed this data? Are there legal requirements for protecting it? Who legitimately needs access?
For Integrity: What's the impact if this data were incorrect? Could wrong data lead to harmful decisions or financial loss? How would you detect if it had been changed?
For Availability: How quickly must this data be accessible? What's the cost if it's unavailable for an hour, a day, or a week? What's the business impact of downtime?

The appropriate balance isn't static – it changes with circumstances. During normal operations, strict access controls might slightly reduce availability in favor of confidentiality. During an incident response, that same organisation might temporarily grant broader access to quickly investigate and contain a breach. After data corruption, additional integrity checks might slow processing to prevent future accuracy problems.

Businesses often make errors in this balance by over-protecting low-sensitivity data (creating unnecessary complexity), under-protecting critical data (being too casual about security), ignoring Integrity while focusing on Confidentiality and Availability, or applying one-size-fits-all security controls regardless of data sensitivity.

The Bottom Line

Effective CyberSecurity requires balancing all three elements appropriately for each type of data and its intended use. This means understanding your data, assessing realistic risks, implementing proportionate controls, remaining flexible as circumstances change, and regularly reviewing whether your current balance is working. The CIA Triad isn't about perfecting each element independently – it's about finding the right balance among all three that serves your organisation's needs while managing acceptable risk. Security that prevents the organization from functioning isn't security – it's an obstacle. The goal is to enable the organisation to achieve its mission while managing risks appropriately.

Lesson 4 – Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability working together