Which statement best describes availability in network security?

• A. Ensuring unauthorized users cannot access data
• B. Ensuring authorized users have access to information and resources
• C. Preventing data modifications
• D. Encrypting data

Answer: (B)

Availability means ensuring authorized users can access information and resources when they need them. It’s about keeping services up and usable, even if components fail or under heavier loads, through redundancy, failover, backups, and proper capacity planning. That’s why the statement describing availability best is the one that says authorized users have access to information and resources.

This is different from confidentiality, which focuses on preventing unauthorized access to data; and from integrity, which aims to prevent or detect unauthorized data changes. Encryption protects data by making it unreadable to others, but encryption alone doesn’t define availability since it doesn’t guarantee that services remain accessible to legitimate users.