Costs of Compromised Data Integrity Breaches

Security breaches influence the integrity of an organization significantly. It would not be wrong to say that it is affected in several ways. Each and every organization has its own set of values and secrets which it doesn’t expose to the public. Even though most organizations claim to be highly transparent and honest with its consumers, several facts are still kept from them. Actually, these facts are not exposed to customers or audience because of the possible negative effects on the reputation and integrity of the firm. For organizations, maintaining a good reputation is very important because it helps in attracting customers and persuading them to purchase their services. If an organization loses its integrity then it means no customer will be willing to trust it for providing beneficial and suitable products.

There is a high risk of exposure to organizational information and data with security breaches. It can result in the loss of valuable information and integrity. Actually, there are breaches with different impact levels. For instance, a low-level breach is certainly not as harmful as a high-level breach. Thus, both costs and risks are increased with an increase in the level and harm of breach. Some breaches are not meant to damage the reputation of a firm but steal the resources which can adversely affect its operations in such a way that it is not able to meet the expected standards. “However, it can still be said that nothing is more important than integrity for an organization operating in any type of industry” (Baerlocher, O'Brien, Newton, Gautam, & Noble, 2010). Regardless of the field, integrity is irreplaceable to companies. As stated above, loss of integrity means that the organization has already lost most of its customer base.

            Integrity means to be honest and transparent with the audience. For instance, if an organization has strong integrity then it will make sure that it is fulfilling its promises with the audience. If altered data is presented to the audience then it will have a negative effect on organizational integrity. Customers will lose their trust in the organization and they will not even turn to it again. There are several risks which emerge due to compromised data like easy access into valuable data which will affect functions and operations of the organization. In order to avoid this from happening, organizations ensure that their security systems are powerful and they can easily prevent attacks. “Losing the integrity of business also indicates that the business is incapable of protecting its own identity” (Yuan & Yu, 2014).

In the military, nothing is certainly more significant than its integrity. The military is actually a symbol of power and secrecy, and losing integrity raises a question if it is not capable of protecting its own information then how can it protect the nation. An organization operating in the field of finance deals with nothing but digits and losing them to hackers is inefficient. It indicates failure. “Thus, it is more than just a little important to strengthen existing security systems and preventing data breaches” (Borthakur, Premo, & Pasqua, 2010).

References of Costs of Compromised Data Integrity Breaches

Baerlocher, M. O., O'Brien, J., Newton, M., Gautam, T., & Noble, J. (2010). Data integrity, reliability and fraud in medical research. European

Journal of Internal Medicine, 21(1), 40-45.

Borthakur, D., Premo, N., & Pasqua, J. (2010). System and method for determining file system data integrity. U.S. Patent 7,653,647.

Yuan, J., & Yu, S. (2014). Efficient public integrity checking for cloud data sharing with multi-user modification. IEEE INFOCOM 2014-IEEE

Conference on Computer Communications, 2121-2129.