How Global Businesses Can Prepare for India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act

Data privacy and compliance norms worldwide are becoming increasingly complex. With regulations like the GDPR (EU), CCPA (California, US), and LGPD (Brazil) already in place, regulatory authorities are prioritizing strict action backed by policy to regulate how data is collected, stored, and shared.

On July 26, 2025, India’s PIB issued a press briefing discussing how authorities plan to implement the Digital Data Protection Act, 2023, following public consultation. This marks another significant chapter in the global effort to enhance data privacy, bringing new challenges and responsibilities for businesses aiming to operate in India.

If your business operates in India and handles Indian citizens’ personal data through digital services, operations, outsourcing, or cloud storage, the DPDP Act applies to you. Understanding its implications and building business readiness is key to maintaining compliance, trust, and operational continuity.

What is India’s DPDP Act?

The Digital Privacy and Data Protection Act, passed in 2023, is India’s first comprehensive law governing privacy and the processing of personal data. It aims to protect individual rights while enabling businesses to operate lawfully and responsibly.

The government released Draft DPDP Rules, 2025 for public consultation, receiving over 6,900 inputs from citizens and stakeholders, showing a clear sign of the act’s broad impact and importance. The DPDP Act introduces roles like Data Fiduciaries (individuals accountable for personal data breaches), requires explicit user consent, mandates data breach notifications, and enables users with the rights to access, correct, or even erase their data.

This signals a rising trend for global enterprises: data sovereignty, accountability, and user-centric control over personal data.

Why Global Businesses Must Pay Attention?

India is one of the fastest-growing digital economies, with over 850 million daily active internet users, making it the second-largest online population globally. Its privacy law reflects both local priorities and global best practices, creating a framework similar to the EU’s GDPR but tailored to local needs and unique features.

For global businesses operating in India or processing Indian personal data, here’s why compliance with the DPDP Act is essential:

• Cross-border Data Processing Comes Under Scrutiny:

  Businesses with data operations spanning geographies would need policy realignment to fit into Indian requirements, including data localization in some cases.

• Legally Mandated Accountability:

  The Act requires data fiduciaries to take reasonable security safeguards and implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to prevent data breaches.

• User-centric Control:

  Like the GDPR, the DPDP Act mandates explicit consent, purpose limitation, and rights to access, correct, or even erase data.

• Penalties for Non-Compliance:

  Policy violations, failure to prevent data breaches, and breaches of duties can result in monetary fines up to $30 million.

A Practical Checklist for Global Businesses to Prepare for the DPDP Act

Here are a few things global businesses with India operations can follow to prepare for the DPDP Act:

Assess Risk Exposure:

• Identifies sources of data that may contain personal information belonging to Indian citizens
• Review the vendor ecosystem and SaaS providers that may create indirect exposure

Map and Classify Your Data

• Perform discovery jobs to rediscover and classify personal data being processed across systems and workflows
• Study and understand data sovereignty and localization mandates while knowing where your data is collected, stored, processed, and archived.

Implement Consent Management

• Revisit consent workflows to ensure they are clear, specific, and easy to withdraw
• Update privacy notices and opt-in forms to reflect DPDP requirements and create workflows to manage requests for access, correction, deletion, and withdrawal of consent

Strengthen Data Security

• Ensure encryption, data masking, and robust role-based access controls are in place
• Adopt breach detection and incident response protocols that align with CERT-In guidelines for cybersecurity

Appoint Accountability Roles

• Consider appointing a data protection officer or an equivalent governance lead to manage compliance across jurisdictions
• Establish a cross-departmental governance committee involving IT, legal, security, and business leaders to oversee implementation and ensure alignment with global and local privacy requirements

How Solix Helps Navigate DPDP and Other Global Privacy Regulations

At Solix, we help global businesses comply and thrive in a privacy-first world. Whether preparing for India’s DPDP Act, scaling GDPR, complying with CCPA, or building enterprise AI, our platform provides data governance, security, privacy, and lifecycle management. This helps you stay ahead of regulations and unlock the actual value of your data.

Here’s how we help solve enterprise governance and regulatory non-compliance challenges:

• Discovering and Masking Sensitive Data

  Solix Sensitive Data Discovery helps enterprises automatically discover sensitive data fields like PII, PHI, and PCI across structured and unstructured data environments. These fields can then be masked (static and dynamic) using Solix Data Masking, helping reduce risk and unauthorized access.

• Consent and Access Management

  With Solix Consumer Data Privacy, you can create custom roles for data access and create workflows for data subject access requests to safeguard sensitive data and meet compliance requirements.

• Discover Dark Data, Identify and Purge ROT Datasets

  Solix Intelligent Data Classification helps businesses rediscover dark datasets to expose silos containing sensitive information. It also identifies and classifies ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial) datasets to assist enterprises in cataloging and governing them, facilitating compliance and reducing storage and compute expenses.

• Information Lifecycle Management

  Several data privacy regulations around the world mandate automated retention and purge policies. The Solix Enterprise Archiving suite helps businesses move data from redundant applications, active storage, email inboxes, and file siloes into a low-cost archival tier storage system backed by the Solix Common Data Platform, which supports the enforcement of automated retention and purge policies while remaining fully governed end-to-end.

Closing Thoughts

The DPDP Act demonstrates India’s dedication to user privacy and data accountability. For global businesses operating in or planning to enter the Indian market, it presents both a regulatory requirement and a strategic opportunity.

Aligning with the Act ensures compliance and helps build trust and goodwill with customers, improves data governance, and even boosts AI-readiness. As enterprises increase their investment in enterprise AI workflows, having a solid data governance and compliance foundation becomes essential.

With Solix, enterprises can turn compliance mandates into a strategic advantage that reduces audit risk, drives cost savings, innovation, data resilience, smarter insights, AI-readiness, and long-term value creation.

Contact us to learn more about how Solix can help solve your compliance challenges.