Which term encompasses data's completeness, consistency, and reliability through its life cycle and guards against tampering to preserve trustworthiness?

• A. Data Integrity
• B. Data Quality
• C. Data Provenance
• D. Data Orchestration

Answer: (A)

Data integrity is the idea that data remains truthful and trustworthy as it moves through creation, storage, transmission, and transformation. It covers completeness so nothing essential is missing, consistency so data remains uniform across systems, and reliability so it stays accurate over time, even as processes update or reuse it. It also includes safeguards against tampering, using checks, versioning, audit trails, and access controls to prevent unauthorized changes and detect any alterations. While data quality talks about how useful data is overall (including timeliness and relevance), and data provenance or data orchestration focus on origin or workflow aspects, the emphasis on preserving the data’s unaltered, trustworthy state across its life cycle makes data integrity the best fit.