Integrity
The principle that information remains accurate, complete, and unaltered except by authorized actions. Integrity ensures you can trust that data has not been tampered with, corrupted, or modified without detection.
Why it matters
If you cannot trust your data, you cannot trust your decisions. An integrity breach means records were modified without authorization: a financial transaction altered, a configuration changed silently, an audit log entry deleted. Unlike confidentiality breaches, integrity violations can go undetected for months, compounding damage as decisions are made on corrupted information. Integrity controls are what make audit trails trustworthy and compliance evidence credible.
In practice
Integrity protection includes checksums and hashing for data at rest, digital signatures for authenticity verification, version control for documents, change management for systems, and immutable logging for audit trails. In vucavoid, integrity is built into the platform: effectiveness reports and risk assessments produce immutable records, evidence carries timestamps and attribution, and the VUCA score itself depends on data integrity across all connected modules.