A Paradox for Indian CIOs
In 2025, Indian CIOs find themselves at a crossroads. Despite record investments in cybersecurity, the average cost of a data breach in India has soared to INR 195 million — a staggering 39% increase since 2020. On the surface, enterprises are spending more than ever on security. Yet the breaches are costlier, the compliance failures more frequent, and the trust deficit wider.
Countering digital attacks is the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) 2023, enforced to protect users across the full data lifecycle. CIOs are, therefore, expected to have comprehensive controls in place that enable discovery, classification, encryption, monitoring and deletion. It is crucial to have an effective plan in place, which also ensures continued operational efficiency and regulatory compliance
For Indian CIOs, this raises a pressing strategic question: How do you safeguard not just systems, but the entire data lifecycle, while enabling innovation and meeting the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) 2023 requirements?
Why Full Lifecycle Security Matters in 2025
The answer lies in moving beyond traditional controls to a lifecycle-first approach — one that reframes data security as a driver of resilience, compliance, and long-term enterprise trust.
The state of India’s data security is sobering. Only 31% of organizations fully classify their data, and just 46% report all cloud-stored data as sensitive. Nearly 43% failed a compliance audit, while 37% suffered a cloud data breach in 2024. These aren’t isolated figures — they reveal a deeper leadership challenge.
If your business falls under the list of companies who don’t comply with security requirements, it’s time to take a good look at your processes. On the flip side, it’s worthy of note that organizations using security AI and automation extensively reduced breach lifecycle by 112 days and saved INR 130 million compared to those with limited deployment.
Unlike traditional approaches, securing data at specific points is inefficient and not enough. Misconfiguration and human error continue to be the top causes of breaches, so it’s important to invest in automated security controls across the data lifecycle and training of employees. Full lifecycle security is not just about ensuring compliance: it’s about creating resilient organizations that can succeed in a growing digital economy.
Level 1: Discovery and Classification
It all begins here: Streamlining your data lifecycle security with effective discovery and classification of data. If you’re unaware of the data you possess, where it’s located, and its sensitivity level, you’re at risk of severe security disasters. Data location becomes difficult in hybrid and multi-cloud environments where data spans multiple platforms and jurisdictions.
The classification capabilities of Fortra’s solution ensures consistent labelling across enterprises, which offers a unified data inventory, a foundation of security policies for your enterprise. Fortra’s classification engine automatically labels data based on context, content, and the compliance needs, which goes on to ensure that new data is immediately secured.
If you’re an enterprise in India that’s handling DPDPA requirements, having this additional layer provides crucial visibility into personal data processing activities. The DPDPA regulation needs all organizations to ensure detailed records of data processing which includes the purpose, category and retention period of data. Maintaining these logs becomes simpler and quicker with automated discovery and classification tools even in complicated environments.
Level 2: Protection and Masking
Now that you know where your data is and classified them according to the different parameters, the next step would be to implement the required protection. If you fail to do so, you leave your organization wide open to different security threats.
Thales
Using the Thales CipherTrust platform, you can get unified lifecycle controls including central and encryption key management across all environments. By choosing this solution, you will ensure that your encryption keys are managed consistently across all infrastructure layers.
Dynamic data masking represents another crucial protection mechanism, particularly for organizations sharing data for analytics, testing, or development. Solutions by Thales can automatically mask or tokenize sensitive data while maintaining functionality for legitimate business purposes. These solutions are highly valuable for Indian enterprises in monitored and regulated sectors like banking, healthcare, and telecommunications.
Netskope
Cloud access security broker (CASB) capabilities by Netskope go beyond just cloud environment protection. That’s where 46% of Indian organizations store all their sensitive data. The Netskope platform gives real-time data loss prevention (DLP), thereby ensuring sensitive information doesn’t leave through unauthorized channels. Added layers of threat protection guard against complex attacks attempting data exfiltration through compromised applications or accounts.
Bringing together encryption, masking, and access controls ensures multiple layers of protection. These layers ensure that even if an attacker gains entry to your systems, your data remains unintelligible and unusable. Such measures are particularly important since misconfiguration and human error cause the most breaches.
Level 3: Storage, Monitoring & Audit
If you’ve done the data protection that’s needed, you’ll then move on to the continuous monitoring and auditing that’s needed. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) gives you the advanced monitoring you need with the Cloud Security Command Center – real-time threat detection across multi-cloud environments. The platforms also employ machine learning capabilities that identify unusual access patterns and suspicious activities, imperative for quick responses that reduce breaches.
Limiting yourself to simple logging won’t help – the GCP solutions give you detailed forensic capabilities and compliance reporting. The audit logs capture granular information about who accessed what data, when, and from where. Clear visibility is important for DPDPA compliance and allows your organization to demonstrate accountability and maintain comprehensive records of personal data processing activities.
The Indian market continues to grow, and cloud-native monitoring is advantageous in this scenario. Increasing data volumes and complexities also mean that traditional approaches to security fall short. Cloud-based solutions are more dynamic and offer consistent visibility and control.
DPDPA Requirement | Technical Control | Business Impact | Implementation Tool |
Data Processing Records | Automated audit logging | Simplified compliance reporting | GCP Cloud Audit Logs |
Access Management | Identity-based encryption | Reduced insider threat risk | Thales CipherTrust |
Breach Notification | Real-time monitoring alerts | 72-hour notification compliance | GCP Security Command Center |
Data Portability | Standardized data formats | Enhanced customer trust | Automated export workflows |
Right to Erasure | Automated deletion workflows | Reduced manual compliance burden | Integrated lifecycle management |
Level 4: Compliance Mapping with DPDP and ISO 27701
The final step towards tightening your data security is compliance. In India, the DPDPA dictates how this is done – through comprehensive technical safety measures for personal data like encryption, testing, and recovery – making sure that security is maintained at every stage. Following a lifestyle security policy makes sure that your organization can implement controls across all the processing activities consistently, while also aligning with regulatory requirements.
Additionally, ISO 27701 brings privacy management frameworks which stress upon effective data lifecycle management. This makes it easier for your organization to gain certifications like ISO 27701, and achieve smoother compliance with evolving regulations. Consider the impact of lifecycle-based controls mapped directly to regulatory requirements:
- Automated audit logging ensures simplified compliance reporting and helps enterprises avoid the 43% audit failure rate we saw in 2024.
- Identity-based encryption and access management directly reduce insider threat risks, addressing one of the most persistent causes of breaches.
- Real-time monitoring alerts align with the 72-hour breach notification requirement, but more importantly, they improve detection and containment speed — which is why firms using automation cut breach lifecycles by 112 days.
- Standardized data formats for portability enhance compliance and simultaneously strengthen customer trust, making enterprises easier to do business with.
- Automated deletion workflows reduce the manual overhead of meeting the “right to erasure,” while embedding accountability into everyday processes.
According to recent reports, nearly 40% of Indian enterprises plan to increase investments in data protection by 2026, driven as much by business benefits as by compliance demands.
By aligning lifecycle security with DPDPA and ISO 27701, CIOs can achieve three outcomes simultaneously:
- Reduce compliance burden and audit failures.
- Improve resilience against insider and outsider threats.
- Build long-term trust in the enterprise’s ability to safeguard data responsibly.
How iValue Orchestrates This Lifecycle
Gathering the individual tools can be expensive, time consuming, and management overhead. iValue Group helps you get a unified and streamlined security ecosystem by handling the orchestration, integration, and oversight of each of these tools. Starting with a detailed assessment, iValue Group works with your CIOs to understand data flows, compliance needs, and business goals—leading up to a tailored security architecture.
iValue’s key capabilities include:
- Comprehensive Risk Assessment
- Strategic Technology Integration
- Automated Policy Enforcement
- Continuous Monitoring and Optimization
- Expert Knowledge Transfer
