Across Asia Pacific, the regulatory momentum is unmistakable, and India is no exception. In India, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP Act), 2023 has fundamentally reshaped how enterprises must think about data accountability, breach readiness, and auditability. Once fully enforced through rules, penalties for non-compliance can reach INR 250 crores (over USD 25 million) for serious violations, particularly where failure to safeguard personal data or delayed breach response is involved. This heightened scrutiny is part of a broader global trend. From DORA in the EU and NIST frameworks in the US to PDPA in Singapore and APP in Australia, regulatory pressure on enterprises worldwide continues to intensify. Regulators, insurers, and customers no longer want assurances alone; they expect organizations to demonstrate where their data resides, how it is protected, and supported by clean, auditable logs, how operations will be restored when disruptions occur.

This marks a clear shift toward explainability-driven resilience. Fast and reliable recovery must now be delivered with traceability and auditability embedded at every step. To withstand regulatory and stakeholder scrutiny, organizations need to design data resilience strategies through a compliance-first lens, ensuring the digital footprint of their data management processes is transparent, defensible, and provable.

Business Case First, Compliance Always

Data outages and cybersecurity attacks are inevitable business risks that need to be tracked, tested, and reported through robust, auditable systems. In India, this urgency is amplified by regulatory expectations from bodies such as CERT-In, RBI, SEBI, and the forthcoming enforcement of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, all of which emphasize timely incident reporting, demonstrable controls, and board-level accountability. The Veeam Data Resilience Maturity Model (DRMM) framework, developed in collaboration with McKinsey, recommends integrating business strategy, people, process and technology to reduce risk, accelerate recovery, and strengthen long-term resilience.

Explainability-driven data resilience, the glue that binds these elements together, needs to become as standardized as audited financial statements, hitting metrics for key stakeholders that include:

• Investor confidence: For India’s listed enterprises and high-growth startups alike, transparent and regularly tested recovery plans strengthen governance disclosures, reduce perceived operational risk, and support valuations during audits, due diligence, and IPO readiness.
• Reputation protection: In a market where customer trust is central to digital adoption from UPI-driven financial services to large consumer platforms fast, provable recovery minimizes service disruption, public fallout, and regulatory escalation following incidents.
• Leadership accountability: Regulations increasingly place accountability on senior management and boards. Explainable resilience provides evidence-based visibility into preparedness, testing frequency, and recovery readiness, supporting informed oversight and regulatory engagement.
• Reduced fines and insurance costs: Clean, auditable controls aligned to DPDP, RBI cyber resilience guidelines, and CERT-In directives help lower exposure to penalties, reduce breach-related litigation risk, and strengthen an organization’s position with cyber insurance providers.

Regulatory Momentum Is Outpacing Compliance Readiness

Across Asia Pacific, the regulatory momentum is unmistakable, and India is firmly part of this acceleration. The Shared Responsibility Framework in Singapore holds financial institutions and telcos accountable for mitigating phishing scams and mandates compensation to scam victims when duties are breached. In Australia, data protection enforcement has intensified, with enterprises facing penalties of up to AUD 50 million (over USD 32 million) for serious data breaches.In India, while detailed implementation rules under the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 are still evolving, the direction of travel is clear. Penalties for significant non-compliance can reach INR 250 crores (over USD 25 million). Beyond the DPDP Act, sectoral regulators have already raised expectations. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) mandates periodic disaster recovery drills defined recovery time objectives, and board-level oversight for regulated entities, while CERT-In requires reporting certain cyber incidents within six hours, along with mandatory log retention and time-synchronized logging. Together, these requirements underscore the need for explainable, auditable data resilience — not just policy declarations.

However, here’s a reality check: Enterprises are just not prepared, including in high-growth digital markets such as India. According to the Veeam Data Resilience Maturity Model (DRMM) report, 30% of CIOs overestimate their data resilience, with fewer than 10% above average. 74% of organizations fall into basic and intermediate levels, highlighting significant improvement opportunities. This gap is particularly concerning for India’s rapidly digitizing enterprises. In Veeam’s Enterprise Buyer’s Guide to Data Protection, 13% of respondents reported having no disaster recovery plan or never having tested one; 28% tested only once a year, and just 27% tested more than twice annually, despite rising regulatory scrutiny, increasing ransomware activity, and growing board-level attention to cyber and operational resilience.

Embed Data Resilience with Explainability

Imagine data resilience as the foundation of an enterprise structure with explainability as its embedded navigational dashboard. In India’s increasingly regulated and digitally intensive environment – spanning BFSI, IT services, telecom, manufacturing, healthcare, and government-linked ecosystems, this explainability is critical to meet expectations from regulators such as CERT-In, RBI, SEBI, and the forthcoming enforcement of the DPDP Act, 2023.

At Veeam, we believe that a four-step approach provides the runway for success:

1. Map, label, and trace data flows:

Start with the question most teams avoid: Do we actually know the data we have? For Indian enterprises operating across hybrid IT environments, the output must be an exhaustive inventory of business-critical services and their data flows across physical, virtual, cloud, SaaS, and backup environments.

Under India’s DPDP framework, organizations are expected to clearly identify personal and sensitive personal data, apply appropriate safeguards, and demonstrate purpose limitation and retention controls. A standardized data classification policy including labelling by sensitivity, associated controls, handling guidelines, and recovery sequence becomes foundational. The ideal outcome is a multi-level data map that is both human-readable and machine-actionable, enabling faster compliance responses and recovery decisions.

2. Develop a data command center:

Once a data classification map is developed, a command center such as that provided by Securiti AI is recommended. Integrating data security posture management with data intelligence platforms such as Veeam Data Platform v13, Indian organizations can trace data lineage, validate policy enforcement, and monitor compliance across production systems, SaaS platforms, cloud workloads, endpoints, and backups.

This level of visibility is particularly important in India, where CERT-In mandates log retention and time-synchronized monitoring, and sectoral regulators increasingly expect near-real-time situational awareness during incidents. A unified command center ensures enterprises can respond quickly, consistently, and with evidence.

3. Test and audit regularly:

Testing and auditing data resilience strategies on a regular basis builds enterprise muscle for quick response and recovery in times of crisis – including ransomware attacks, cloud outages, and operational disruptions that are rising across India’s digital economy. This involves scheduling automated tests several times a year, ensuring offline, air-gapped, and immutable copies. For regulated Indian entities, such as banks and payment service providers, regular disaster recovery drills and documented outcomes are not optional. Standardizing restore procedures, developing service-specific runbooks, and maintaining clean audit trails ensures readiness for both operational incidents and regulatory inspections.

4. Show the evidence:

Make it easy for decision makers with a single dashboard that has full visibility over key metrics including coverage of assets protected, backup and immutability success rates, drill frequency and pass rate, recovery readiness and compliance posture mapped with evidence links.

For Indian boards, CISOs, and risk committees, this evidence-based view supports informed decision-making, regulatory engagement, cyber insurance discussions, and investor assurance. Evidence links replace assumptions, enabling faster and more confident responses during audits or breach disclosures.

According to the DRMM framework, top performing enterprises score high on a host of business metrics including 7x faster recovery speed (MTTR), 3x less downtime (RTO), 4x less data loss (RPO) and around 10% higher average revenue growth rate- — advantages that are especially critical for Indian organizations competing in global markets while navigating rising regulatory expectations.

Make Explainable and Compliance-Ready Data Resilience Your Strategic Differentiator

While data protection requirements are varied across markets, the demands from regulators are all converging around similar themes of availability, traceability and accountability. In India, this convergence is already visible through the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, CERT-In cyber incident reporting mandates, and sectoral regulations from bodies such as the RBI and SEBI, all of which emphasize provable controls, timely recovery, and clear lines of responsibility.

For multi-regional enterprises, operating out of India or serving global markets, the strategic objective should be a harmonized, explainable system of data resilience controls. Build once, align to the most stringent global regulations, and overlay India-specific evidence requirements — including incident reporting timelines, audit trails, and recovery test documentation, to remain continuously audit-ready across geographies.

As India strengthens its position as a global digital and services hub, organizations that can demonstrate fast restores, comprehensive coverage across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and compliance-ready evidence on demand will move faster than their peers. Explainable data resilience is no longer just a risk-mitigation exercise, it is a scalable competitive advantage that enables confident expansion, stronger stakeholder trust, and sustained business growth.

Taking it Forward

So, ask your team if they can explain every copy of critical data. Are there offline, air-gapped, and immutable copies for critical business services and can we prove it? What was the last automated recovery test for each and how did we fare? If we had to brief the Board or a regulator such as CERT-In or the RBI , could we show the data flow, the controls and the recovery runbook clearly? If the answers don’t flow easily, the explainability gap is a clear signal of compounding risks – operational, business, reputation, regulatory, particularly in India’s increasingly enforcement-driven data protection environment.

The good news is that Veeam’s suite of trusted data and safe AI-driven solutions provides the building blocks to integrate business intelligence, data protection, backup, testing, and recovery across enterprises of every size. What’s required is a mindset shift, treating explainability, data resilience, and compliance not as separate initiatives, but as a unified baseline capability that enables confidence, continuity, and growth in India’s digital economy.

The author is Rick Vanover, Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam Software & Sandeep Bhambure, Vice President and Managing Director, India & SAARC at Veeam.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETCISO does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETCISO shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organization directly or indirectly.

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