Data protection reliability is the process that ensures the accuracy, completeness and secure throughout its lifecycle, from the moment of creation until the point of archival or deletion. This includes safeguarding against unauthorised access to data, corruption, and mistakes by using strong security measures, audits, and checksum validations. Reliability of data is essential to enabling confident and informed decisions, allowing businesses to make use of data to drive business results.
Data reliability can be compromised by a variety factors, among them
Data Source Credibility: A dataset’s credibility and reliability are greatly affected by its provenance. Credible sources have a history of generating reliable data and are validated through peer reviews, expert validations or the adherence to industry standards.
Human Errors Recording and data entry errors can introduce inaccuracies to an information set, reducing its reliability. Standardized procedures and training are vital to avoid these mistakes.
Backup and Storage A backup plan, such as 3-2-1 (3 copies on two local devices and one offsite) minimizes the risk of data loss due to natural disasters or hardware malfunctions. Physical integrity is another aspect to consider. Organisations that use multiple technology vendors need to ensure the physical integrity of all their data systems to be protected and maintained.
Reliability is a thorny subject. The most important aspect is that businesses use trustworthy and reliable data to make decisions and create value. To achieve this, companies need to create an environment of trust in data and ensure reliability of data protection that their processes are designed to produce trustworthy results, including adopting standardized methodologies, educating data collectors, and offering reliable tools.