A key set of guidelines used by most organizations for securing information is called the CIA Triad:  Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.
Confidentiality: Accessible and readable only by authorized personnel.
Integrity: Data is not manipulated by unauthorized personnel.
Availability: Ensuring data is available to the user whenever it is required. It should also support hardware maintenance, regular upgrades, recovery, network bottleneck, and data backup.