By Balaji Rao, Area Vice President, India & SAARC
India’s digital economy runs on data, and the country has reached a stage where scale collides with scrutiny. Every retail payment, telemedicine consultation, and logistics update add to a national data store expanding at twice the pace of the overall economy. The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, has now redrawn the boundaries of accountability. Enterprises must be able to prove, at any moment, that every record is intact, sovereign, and recoverable without leakage.
The economic context underlines the stakes. India’s digital economy already contributes 11.74% of GDP (₹31.64 lakh crore) and will account for nearly one-fifth of national income according to 2029-30 projections. Data is both the engine and the infrastructure of this growth. The DPDP Act arrives at this stage of acceleration, making resilience and sovereignty issues of national competitiveness rather than technical concerns.
Rethinking resilience for the DPDP era
Traditional backup and recovery systems were built for slower times when nightly snapshots and quarterly audits were enough. These fragmented tools and siloed processes cannot deliver the continuous assurance now demanded by regulators. Enterprises require architectural redesigns where resilience is embedded in daily operations rather than bolted on as a reactive function.
This requirement has changed the governance equation. Accountability for cyber resilience has moved decisively into the boardroom. Business leaders are facing great scrutiny for data governance failures, transforming cyber resilience from an IT concern to a core aspect of corporate responsibility.
The DPDP Act expects enterprises to demonstrate readiness at all times and the old approach of annual audits cannot provide that assurance. Systems must be able to validate data integrity, enforce residency rules, and trigger breach responses instantly. This expectation is especially demanding in India’s hybrid IT environments, where shadow IT and fragmented cloud use create governance blind spots.
While perimeter defence remains crucial, the likelihood of getting breached has increased significantly. Enterprises can no longer rely on prevention alone, they also need offensive resilience capabilities, including instant recovery, forensic readiness, and transparent audit trails. SaaS-based cyber resilience platforms supports enterprises in meeting this need. Their cloud-native design helps make continuous compliance more practical, by offering capabilities such as immutable backups, automated eDiscovery, and chain-of-custody reporting to assist with regulatory scrutiny. For enterprises, this allows resilience to evolve from a capital-intensive investment to an operational service that can be scaled on demand while maintaining accountability.
Turning compliance into growth advantage
As India’s digital intensity rises, the link between resilience, compliance and growth becomes clearer. Enterprises that modernise their data architectures can scale faster, launch new services with confidence, and enter new markets without regulatory hesitation. Those that remain dependent on legacy models will find themselves spending more time on damage control than on innovation.
AI will accelerate this momentum. Predictive monitoring, anomaly detection, and automated security responses can significantly reduce exposure. These capabilities, however, are effective only when built on strong data foundations. Without architectural readiness, AI investments remain underutilised. Cyber resilience must therefore be treated as foundational infrastructure, no different from power supply or logistics networks.
As a result, SaaS based cyber resilience platforms are resonating in India because it changes how resilience is consumed. Instead of building and maintaining complex in-house architectures, enterprises can access cloud-native platforms that deliver compliance readiness, recovery assurance, and governance visibility on demand. This model reduces the burden of constant upgrades and shifting regulations, while creating a shared responsibility framework where resilience evolves at the pace of risk.
The DPDP Act is the first step in a broader regulatory transformation. Tighter frameworks will follow, raising expectations around data accountability and precision. Especially with organisations that aim to operate globally, they also face an expanding set of international regulations to comply with. Ultimately, enterprises that continue patching systems reactively will sink deeper into compliance cycles, while those that invest in resilient architectures will convert regulation into long-term advantage.
When enterprises approach resilience as a core part of their business strategy, they move beyond compliance and earn lasting trust with stakeholders to scale with confidence. Regulation then becomes a catalyst for maturity rather than a constraint on growth. India’s digital future will belong to those that make this shift decisively, setting the pace for innovation and competitiveness in a data-first economy.