This is where the DPDPA differs from ISO 27001. ISO hands you a catalogue of 93 named controls to work through. The DPDPA instead asks for "reasonable security safeguards" — a principle, not a checklist. That sounds vaguer, but Rule 6 of the DPDP Rules, 2025 pins it down to a concrete, minimum set of measures every Data Fiduciary (and its processors) must have. These are your controls — and each one is measurable.

Rule 6 safeguard	What it means in practice	How to measure / evidence it
Encryption & masking	Encrypt personal data at rest and in transit; mask, obfuscate, or tokenise it where you can	% of data stores encrypted, key-management policy, tokenisation coverage
Access controls	Least-privilege access to every system holding personal data; multi-factor authentication	access-review reports, MFA coverage, joiner–mover–leaver records
Logging & monitoring	Log and review who accesses personal data, to detect unauthorised access, investigate, and remediate	log coverage, alerting rules, review cadence
Log retention (1 year)	Keep those access logs for at least one year	retention configuration, log-store audit
Backups & resilience	Be able to keep processing if data is destroyed or compromised	backup success rate, tested restore (RTO / RPO)
Breach detection & response	Detect, investigate, and remediate breaches quickly	detection tooling, an incident runbook, drill records
Processor safeguards	Contractually bind every vendor to the same measures — you stay accountable	signed data-processing agreements, vendor security reviews

The breach clock (Rule 7). If a breach does happen, the timing is strict: notify affected individuals without delay (in clear language — what happened, the likely impact, what you're doing, and what they should do), and file a detailed report to the Data Protection Board within 72 hours of becoming aware. You can only hit that clock if your logging and detection (the controls above) are already working.

The 72-hour breach protocol: detect the breach, notify affected people without delay, and report to the Data Protection Board within 72 hours

So how do you measure compliance? Because "reasonable" isn't a number, you prove it by adopting a recognised control framework and keeping live evidence against it. In practice, that means mapping the Rule 6 safeguards onto a control set you already understand — ISO 27001, SOC 2, or NIST — then scoring every control as implemented, partial, or not started, assigning an owner, and keeping the evidence current for the day the Board asks. That control-by-control, evidence-backed view is exactly how you turn a principle into something you can measure.

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