India's DPDP Passed: Ease Compliance with Skyflow

With the passage of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, companies with customers in India must meet new data protection requirements. This blog post will explain how businesses can protect customer data, comply with DPDP, and avoid fines of up to Rs 250 crore (approximately $30 million).

Background on the DPDP Act

India’s parliament introduced the DPDP Bill in late 2022, and it became law in 2023. The DPDP Act sets nationwide standards for handling personal data, including names, phone numbers, and Aadhaar (national ID).The practical impact on companies will depend on interpretations by the newly created Data Protection Board (DPB).

A Worldwide Trend: More Data Regulations

Globally, companies face a shifting regulatory landscape concerning personal data collection, storage, and processing. Each new law introduces uncertainties.

Key similarities among data protection laws include:

• Preventing data breaches using isolation, encryption, and access control
• Limiting data use to stated purposes
• Forbidding unnecessary data retention
• Requiring breach notifications
• Granting individuals rights over their data

Solutions for GDPR compliance can often help with DPDP compliance, allowing companies to be proactive and reduce regulatory uncertainty.

India’s DPDP Act: New Challenges for Businesses

The DPDP act isn’t exactly the same as the other laws – and it’s worth knowing the differences.

Key changes include:

• Focus on "digital personal data," including data collected offline but stored digitally
• Increased fines up to Rs 250 crore
• Duties for data principals, including fines for false complaints
• Updated provisions on international data transfers
• Exemptions and consent guidelines revisions

How to More Easily Comply with DPDP 

A data privacy vault architecture is the new standard – used by Netflix, Apple, Google, and more – for protecting sensitive data and easing compliance with ever-changing laws like DPDP. Skyflow’s data privacy vault allows businesses to protect sensitive data while maintaining its usability for use cases across your organization such as support, analytics, and marketing. Easily map PII and apply governance policies across their entire technological stack at scale.

Skyflow allows you to isolate, protect, and govern personal data and is certified SOC2 Type 2, ISO 27001, and PCI Level 1 compliant, using advanced encryption, redaction, and access control.

Key capabilities include:

• Data Governance Engine: Controls who sees what data, ensuring compliance with storage and purpose limitations
• Data Residency Made Easy: Isolate and stores PII regionally in a tokenized format, which means it never leaves the country
• Polymorphic Encryption: Allows partial data decryption and encrypted data operations without full decryption
• Secure Third-party Sharing: Protects data shared with third parties and supports tokenization to prevent data sprawl
• Security controls: Offers bring your own key and automated key management
• Highly scalable: Highly performant multi-cloud multi-region platform

By polymorphically tokenizing data, Skyflow helps manage data without backend systems touching it, centralizing access controls and simplifying compliance with data requests.

Aadhaar data, being highly sensitive, requires stringent protection measures. Skyflow’s data privacy vault for Aadhaar data is designed to securely isolate and protect this data, ensuring compliance with the DPDP Act and other regulatory requirements. 

The Aadhaar Vault employs polymorphic encryption and access control mechanisms to safeguard personal information such as Aadhaar numbers. By storing Aadhaar data in a dedicated vault, businesses can prevent unauthorized access, reduce the risk of breaches, and maintain strict control over data access and usage. This approach not only ensures the security of Aadhaar data but also simplifies compliance with stringent data protection regulations.

Final Thoughts

Data protection regulations can create uncertainty, but they don’t have to hinder businesses. Skyflow has a strong presence in India, with a Bangalore office supporting sales, solutions architecture, and customer implementation. This ensures businesses in India receive the same high level of service as those in North America.

Using Skyflow allows companies to:

• Isolate personal data for protection..
• Govern access to personal data precisely.
• Protect personal data with encryption and dedicated storage, reducing compliance concerns.

If you’d like to learn more about how Skyflow can help you protect your customers’ personal data while easing compliance, contact us to learn more.