Pocket's Checklist to get DPDP started

Why DPDP? Key Risks and Pocket Checklist to get started. It will probably cost 5% of the DPDP Penalty to implement the solution.

It's great to see that India is rolling out a Digital Personal & Data Privacy (DPDP) act (similar to GDPR) in a phased manner, using principles of Agile Software Development, rather than a Big Bang Approach.

Why should you worry about the DPDP?

As per DPDP, Non-compliance can lead to heavy penalties, with organizations facing fines exceeding 200 Crores. Moreover, the topline revenue of businesses is at stake if they fall short of DPDP standards.

One of the quick approaches to getting DPDP compliance is to align your existing practices and augment them to meet DPDP requirements.

Key Risks: External, Internal, Lateral, Upcoming

External Risks:

• Unpatched critical vulnerabilities.
• Exposed attack surfaces (APIs, Buckets, DBs).
• Lack of visibility into the deep and dark web.

Internal Risks:

• Insecure software development pipeline.
• Misconfigured data access management.

Lateral Risks:

• Malicious and insecure 3rd party software.
• Insecure and vulnerable 3rd parties.
• Risks associated with non-DPDP compliant 3rd parties.

Upcoming Risks:

• Data flowing out to External AI services.
• Non-compliant Gen AI APIs and models.
• Non-compliant internal AI Development Life Cycle (ADLC).

Your Pocket Compliance Checklist

1. Gain Visibility:

• Data classification mapping: Create a map of data storages, data flow and data classification.
• Threat modeling: Create a map of Threat actors, Systems, Risks & Security Controls.
• As-is assessment: Perform an initial assessment to discover DPDP readiness.

2. Define and Rollout Policy:

• Define risks related to people, processes, and technology.
• Policy rollout and enforcement.
• Communication and education.
• Monitoring and management.
• Response and recovery guidelines and playbook.

3. Identify, Protect, and Detect:

• Attack surface management.
• Dark web monitoring.
• Software supply chain hardening.
• 3rd party and vendor assessments.
• Pentesting and red teaming.
• Data access management (DAM).
• Data sanitation at development and production.

Finally, DPDP will evolve into a more complex act similar to GDPR. It will be economical and wise to make your organization compliant with DPDP when it is still simple.?

Do you think DPDP does not apply to your organization? Think Again.