In today’s data-driven world, data integrity has become essential for the proper functioning of businesses and for informed decision making. This is especially true in the Industry 4.0 sector, where data is at the core of its operations, driven mainly by digitization and the proliferation of technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). By implementing data integrity techniques and methodologies, companies can significantly improve their data governance and protect against security breaches, which will make their businesses more efficient and reliable, allowing them to take better operational decisions, reduce risks, and leverage the advantages of Industry 4.0.
In this post, we will explore the importance of data integrity to Industry 4.0, and discuss its advantages, enabling technologies and how it relates to industry regulations and standards, such as GDPR or ISO 27001.
WHAT IS DATA INTEGRITY?
Data integrity refers to the completeness, consistency, accuracy, and authenticity of data throughout its lifecycle. With the proliferation of IoT devices, big data, analytics and AI, data integrity has become an increasingly critical issue.
Data integrity is a prerequisite for data quality and plays a critical role in improving decision-making and operational efficiency. While data quality takes care of providing relevant information, data integrity ensures its transparency and authenticity.
Data integrity also contributes to more robust data security. While the goal of data security is to protect information from outside attacks, data integrity is concerned with keeping information intact and accurate for the entirety of its existence, avoiding unwanted manipulations or highlighting the existence of errors.
Since data security and data quality are essential to a successful digital transformation effort, the implementation of data integrity is crucial in any industry. To know more about this read our blog “What is data integrity and why is it important”.
WHY DATA INTEGRITY IS IMPORTANT IN INDUSTRY 4.0
HARMONIZATION OF DECENTRALIZED DATA FLOWS
Digitization is a catalyst for change. For many industries, digital transformation brings the massive productivity, resilience and sustainability benefits. Companies and industries are implementing multiple solutions and technologies to advance to Industry 4.0, like installation of multiple IoT devices to monitor the real world or applications based on AI to perform predictive maintenance or process optimization. With the proliferation of various applications creating and using vast amount of data, maintaining the integrity of information across interconnected systems has become a major challenge. This has led to the creation of decentralized data silos that must communicate and exchange information effectively.
While the traditional approach to solving this issue is through the qualification of individual systems, this often overlooks the overall context and fails to manage data properly throughout the end-to-end process. To guarantee secure and reliable intercommunication among systems and applications, it is essential to maintain the integrity of data. By doing so, companies can focus on processes and ensure that facilities mature in relation to recorded information.
Ultimately, processes and records (along with their data) must be the starting point for engineering and qualification of any system.
ASSURANCE AND COMPLIANCE
Ensuring data integrity is an essential part of the quality assurance procedure, which enables companies to maintain product quality, efficacy, and safety. The pharmaceutical sector, for example, relies on data integrity standards such as the FDA and ALCOA+ guidelines to assess and mitigate data integrity risks and avoid regulatory product rejections. You can learn more about data integrity for Pharma in our post Data Integrity in Pharma.
Apart from complying with industry-specific regulations, companies must also pay attention to general data protection regulations such as GDPR. By maintaining data integrity, companies can prevent the misuse of personal data.
Cybersecurity is another crucial area that companies need to address to ensure data integrity. Regulations such as NIST SP 800-171 establish security requirements for U.S. government contractors to protect unclassified information. Under this regulation, data integrity involves guarding against improper information modification or destruction, and ensuring information non-repudiation and authenticity.
Data integrity also support the compliance of standards such as ISO27001 (Information Security) or ISO27037 (Digital evidence).
ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES TO ACHIEVE DATA INTEGRITY
To ensure data integrity, it is crucial to leverage the right technologies. Blockchain technology is an essential tool in this regard, providing secure and immutable records of process operations and product information. This results in reliable data validation and verification, preventing the collection and processing of fraudulent data. This, in turn, maximizes efficiency and process trustworthiness.
Cryptography is another critical technology that can help secure data against unwanted access. It reinforces the consistency of information and reduces the possibility of data breaches.
By combining the power of blockchain and cryptography, data can be guaranteed to be trusted, authentic, and accurate. This leads to improved decision-making, increased operational efficiency, and reduced risk of security breaches.
SUMMARY
The success of Industry 4.0 in any business relies heavily on data integrity. Precise, trusted, and secure data is crucial for enhancing operational efficiency and making intelligent decisions. To ensure data integrity, companies can incorporate advanced technologies such as cryptography and blockchain solutions, which guarantee the immutability of the collected data. This in turn, helps to comply with some regulations such as GDPR, NIST SP 800-171 or standards like ISO 27001, to avoid penalties and fines. In this aspect, data integrity plays a pivotal role in generating reliable audit trails by enhancing data transparency and authenticity.
By implementing data integrity solutions, companies can fully capitalize on the benefits of Industry 4.0. They can mitigate the risk of data breaches, enhance decision-making, augment operational efficiency, and gain a competitive edge.
3 important steps to ensure data integrity:
- Standardize data collection format and filtering before storing.
- Validate and diagnose data, check for errors.
- Block bad data at the source.
ABOUT US
Armilis is a leading deep tech company that specializes in data integrity, providing solutions to ensure the consistency, authenticity, and accuracy of data throughout its life cycle.
Our software layer is based on cryptography and blockchain, enabling seamless integration with any system, resulting in enhanced trust, efficiency, and security for existing or new digital infrastructures.
We cater to industry 4.0 and the SMART world, where data is vital to daily operations, focusing on delivering unparalleled data management and governance solutions.