Title: What is Security?
Course: IN 2001 Principle of Information Assurance > Section: Module 1: Chapter One

What is Security?

In general, security is “the quality or state of being secure—to be free from danger.”  It means to be protected from adversaries, from those who would do harm, intentionally or otherwise.

A successful organization should have the following multiple layers of security in place for the protection of its operations:

- Physical security to protect the physical items, objects or areas of an organization from unauthorized access and misuse
- Personal security to protect the individual or group of individuals who are authorized to access the organization and its operations
- Operations security to protect the details of a particular operation or series of activities
- Communications security to protect an organization’s communications media, technology and content
- Network security to protect networking components, connections and contents
- Information security to protect information assets

Information security, therefore, is the protection of information and its critical elements, including the systems and hardware that use, store and transmit that information. But to protect the information and its related systems from danger, tools, such as policy, awareness, training, education and technology, are necessary.

The C.I.A. triangle has been considered the industry standard for computer security since the development of the mainframe.  It was solely based on three characteristics that described the utility of information:  confidentiality, integrity and availability.  The C.I.A. triangle has expanded into a list of critical characteristics of information.