Which of the following is a key benefit of integrity protection?

Integrity protection is crucial in maintaining the consistency, accuracy, and trustworthiness of data over its lifecycle. It ensures that data remains unaltered during transmission or storage, which helps in confirming that the data has not been tampered with by unauthorized individuals. This capability is a fundamental part of safeguarding systems and networks against various threats, including malware attacks. Malware often seeks to alter or corrupt data, and integrity protection mechanisms, such as checksums, digital signatures, or hashing, help in detecting and preventing such alterations. By ensuring data integrity, systems can defend against some forms of malware that try to compromise data authenticity.

Other options, while they have their own merits, do not directly relate to the primary function of integrity protection. Enhanced user experience typically focuses on usability and performance enhancements rather than data integrity. An increase in system speed is more related to performance optimization and does not specifically correlate with data integrity measures. Similarly, a reduction in system updates may deal with efficiency in maintenance rather than ensuring that data integrity is preserved.