What is data integrity?

Organizations rely on clean data for decision-making, predicting consumer behavior, assessing market trends and securing against data breaches. As data volumes within the organizations skyrocket, and that data is used to make decisions about the company’s future, maximizing data integrity becomes ever more important.

To acheive data integrity, organizations adhere to processes including error checking, validation procedures and strict security measures like encryption, access control and backups. The goal of data integrity is to help make sure data analytics are based on reliable information supported by regulatory frameworks like GDPR–and that sensitive information is protected from unauthorized access or exploitation.

Data integrity is not confined to a single tool or platform; instead, it’s a comprehensive approach that involves the collective effort of an organization’s technology infrastructure, policies and the individuals who work with the data system to guarantee that data remains a reliable asset.

Data integrity is similar to quality control in traditional product-oriented businesses and ensures the raw material is correct, secure and appropriate for its intended use.

Reliance on good data in business analytics, customer interactions and compliance highlights the importance of data integrity throughout the organization. The adage "garbage in, garbage out" is highly relevant when using data to inform sound business decisions, treat customers fairly and correctly and facilitate accurate businesses reports that comply with industry regulations. Bad data, once operationalized, leads to undesirable outcomes.

Organizations need to keep data complete, accurate, consistent and secure throughout its lifecycle. Data integrity helps promote this completeness by keeping all data elements intact, without alteration, truncation or loss and by preventing changes that could distort analysis and jeopardize consistent testing conditions. Without data integrity processes, organizations would be unable to verify that future data matches past data, regardless of access patterns. Additionally, data integrity serves to strengthen data security by controlling access and protecting against unauthorized exploitation through authentication, authorization, encryption and comprehensive data protection strategies, including backups and access logging.

Beyond decision-making, data integrity is crucial for protecting the personal and sensitive information of data subjects. Mistakes in handling customer data, whether through human error or cyber-attacks, can lead to breaches of privacy and trust, misrepresentation of individuals and potentially severe reputational damage. This is equally true for less sensitive first-party data, where inaccuracies can skew the company's understanding and treatment of its users, affecting their inclusion in trends and interactions with the brand. Maintaining data integrity, therefore, is not merely a compliance or operational issue but a strategic imperative that impacts every facet of an organization's relationship with its customers and its position in the market.

The core conceit of data integrity is about ensuring the dataset’s usability for core business analytics purposes. It underpins data stability, performance, recoverability and security of data.

The problem is data can be compromised in various ways: by human error, unintended transfer errors, viruses, software bugs, malware, hacking, comprised hardware and physical damage to devices. Organizations can achieve integrity by employing integrity constraints and defining the rules and procedures around working with data. Integrity constraints cover actions like deletion, insertion and the alteration of information - which allows integrity enforcement in common systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP) databases, customer relationship management (CRM) systems and supply chain management systems.

Five types of data integrity help organizatons verify and maintain the quality of their data:

Data integrity, data quality and data security are foundational concepts in managing enterprise data and are often erroneously used interchangeably.

Data quality focuses on data conditions based on factors such as accuracy, completeness, uniqueness and timeliness.

Data security addresses data protection from unauthorized access, breaches and other forms of misconduct. It encompasses the technologies, policies and practices deployed to safeguard data across its lifecycle, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive information to maintain confidentiality and trust.

Data integrity is the overarching principle that includes data quality and security elements. It serves to verify the accuracy and consistency of data across its entire lifecycle—from creation and storage to retrieval and deletion—by enforcing rules and standards that prevent unauthorized data alteration. Data integrity mechanisms help to ensure that data is not only correct and accessible but also protected against unauthorized tampering, thus supporting compliance with industry and government regulations.

Data integrity is a concern across industries, with each adopting unique practices and standards to safeguard their data. The pharmaceutical industry must adhere to stringent guidelines set forth by regulatory bodies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA’s draft guidance for pharmaceutical manufacturers emphasizes compliance with the codes and federal regulations to certify that medications are produced consistently and are traceable, safe for consumption and effective. Similarly, international standards like ISO 13485 for medical devices underscore the global importance of data integrity in manufacturing, ensuring products meet the highest safety and quality standards.

In the financial sector, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has recognized the need for robust data integrity measures, particularly in automated trading and money movement surveillance systems. FINRA’s initiatives to develop and expand data integrity programs reflect a broader industry effort to secure financial transactions and sensitive customer information, which is crucial for maintaining trust and compliance in a heavily regulated environment.

Mining and product manufacturing industries, too, are increasingly focusing on data integrity within their automation and production monitoring systems. The goal is to guarantee that the data driving operational decisions and efficiency improvements are accurate and reliable, preventing costly errors and enhancing competitiveness.

Cloud storage database providers face unique challenges in maintaining the integrity and provenance of customer data. With the increasing reliance on cloud services for data storage and processing, these providers must implement sophisticated measures to track and prevent data violations, ensuring their clients’ information remains secure and unaltered.

Specific examples of data integrity applications also include healthcare, where errors in electronic health records can have dire consequences. In finance, accurate transaction data is foundational for risk assessment and fraud detection, with practices such as know-your-customer (KYC) protocols playing a critical role in verifying customer information and maintaining regulatory compliance. Educational institutions depend on precise student records for enrollment management, academic tracking and resource allocation.

Securing data integrity in enterprise organizations is not a one-time task but a continuous effort that requires a holistic strategy involving technology, processes and people to validate data to the fullest. The following strategies and best practices protect data assets and empower organizations to leverage data confidently for decision-making and innovation.

Implementing data integrity checks as close to the data entry point as possible - such as a human at a keyboard or an application transmitting data—limits and specifies the type of information allowed to enter the database.

The sheer variety of data vulnerabilities underscores the importance of a comprehensive approach to safeguarding data. Managing data integrity throughout an organization is accomplished by a broad spectrum of policies, guidelines and rules called integrity constraints, that cover the diverse aspects of data management, from retention to relationships between different pieces of data and the people working with them.

Integrity constraints are tied to the relational data model types: entity, referential, domain and user-defined. For example, domain constraints limit the type of values a column can hold, so an “age” column could feasibly only accept integers between 1 – 120.

Entity integrity provides instructions so that each row in a table is unique and identifiable, typically enforced by a primary key, meaning there is a unique identifier for every row in a database table.

Integrity constraints also guarantee that relationships between tables are clearly defined and maintained through foreign keys, which are columns or sets of columns in one table that reference the primary key of another table.

These constraints confirm that the data in each field adheres to specified formats and values and that any additional rules tailored to specific organizational needs are met.

Retention guidelines and policies specify how long data should be stored in a database to enforce consistency and minimize errors that stem from old information. Data backups can protect against data loss and provide a fail-safe in the event of system failures, data corruption or other unforeseen incidents that might compromise data integrity. Effective backup strategies should include regular snapshots of data stored in secure, geographically dispersed locations to confirm data can be restored with minimal loss.

Connectivity and data access also play pivotal roles in maintaining data integrity. Ensuring seamless connectivity between different data sources and systems allows for the consistent flow of information across the organization.

Managing data access helps to ensure that only authorized personnel can modify or interact with data to reduce the risk of accidental or malicious data tampering.

In addition, ongoing vigilance across the organization also helps maintain data integrity. Regular error checking, cybersecurity awareness and clear communication among team members about the significance of accurate data are important.

Organizations must ensure the physical integrity of data, using measures like uninterruptible power supplies and redundant hardware.

Once data is collected, strong database management practices can enforce rules that prevent the creation of duplicate data. Leveraging technology like data lineage tools - which trace data origin and transformations - for audit trials, data catalogs that offer access control security features, rigorous input validation processes and a modern database system to help prevent integrity breaches.

Database systems come equipped with features that support integrity constraints, offloading the responsibility of checking for accuracy to the database itself. For example, mechanisms such as parent-and-child relationships illustrate how referential integrity processes managed at the database level can automatically safeguard data integrity by helping to ensure that relationships between records are preserved, preventing orphaned records and unauthorized deletions.

Data validation tools like IBM Databand and Ataccama are an essential step for achieving accuracy, consistency and completeness. Validation tools help to identify discrepancies or anomalies that might indicate issues. Once integrated into a data management system these tools verify the quality and integrity of the data continually.

This centralized approach helps keep data management systems stable while ensuring reusability and easy data maintenance across different applications.

An enterprise keen to foster a culture that prioritizes data accuracy and security must educate business leaders and employees about the risks of using unsafe or bad data.