Information Assurance (IA)

The act of providing trust of the information, that the Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability (CIA) of the information are not violated, e.g. ensuring that data is not lost when critical issues arise. These issues include, but are not limited to: natural disasters, computer/server malfunction or physical theft. Since most information is stored on computers in our modern era, information assurance is typically dealt with by IT security specialists. A common method of providing information assurance is to have an off-site backup of the data in case one of the mentioned issues arise.