Products    Information Assurance

Information assurance (IA) is the practice of managing information-related risks. More specifically, IA practitioners seek to protect and defend information and information systems by ensuring confidentiality, integrity, authentication, availability, and non-repudiation. These goals are relevant whether the information is in storage, processing, or transit, and whether threatened by malice or accident. In other words, IA is the process of ensuring that authorized users have access to authorized information at the authorized time.

Information assurance is closely related to information security and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. However, IA's broader connotation also includes reliability and emphasizes strategic risk management . In addition to defending against malicious hackers and code (e.g., viruses), IA includes other corporate governance issues such as privacy, compliance, audits, business continuity, and disaster recovery. Further, while information security draws primarily from computer science, IA is interdisciplinary and draws from multiple fields, including accounting, fraud examination, forensic science, management science, systems engineering, security engineering, and criminology, in addition to computer science. Therefore, IA is best thought of as a superset of information security. Information assurance is not just Computer Security because it includes security issues that do not involve computers.

The U.S. Government's National Information Assurance Glossary defines IA as:

Measures that protect and defend information and information systems by ensuring their availability, integrity, authentication, confidentiality, and non-repudiation. These measures include providing for restoration of information systems by incorporating protection, detection, and reaction capabilities.

The Department of Defense leads this mission on behalf of the U.S. Government. The primary defense support agency for information assurance is the National Security Agency (NSA).

Information Assurance is one of the primary technology focuses of Prescint and our partners. Our collective team has both extensive technical and market experience in this arena.

For more information on these and other industry leading products contact us at sales@prescint.com.

The definition and overview information on this page is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Information Assurance" .