Assuring system data integrity-an overview

The author explores a number of approaches and techniques for detecting, correcting, recovering from, and preventing system data integrity problems associated with security breaches, environmental hazards, human error, and system malfunction due to hardware/software defect or failure. He starts out with a description of some techniques for detecting compromised data integrity resulting from both fraudulent (intended) and nonfraudulent (unintended) data corruption. Emphasis is placed on three general approaches: (1) building in system quality for preventing certain of these problems, (2) placing routines into data systems for detecting problems that cannot be prevented, and (3) designing functionality into these systems for recovering from compromised integrity. The author examines how selected system features and functionality are designed to help ensure data integrity. The role of the system in assuring data integrity is examined