On October 30, we brought Vembu Meet to Coimbatore at Welcomhotel by ITC Hotels, Race Course. After Chennai and Mumbai, this was the third edition of our city-wise dialogue series on India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act.
Each city has given the series something different. Coimbatore gave us a room of IT leaders from finance, healthcare, manufacturing and education, and a panel that kept the conversation grounded in how they handle data protection in their own organisations.
Why Coimbatore
Coimbatore runs on hospitals, colleges, textile mills and manufacturing units, and each of them handles personal data every day: patient records, student data, employee and customer details. That makes DPDP a working question here, not a theoretical one.
The room reflected that. Organisations such as Sri Ramakrishna Hospital, The Eye Foundation, The Arya Vaidya Pharmacy (Coimbatore) Ltd., PSG Institutions, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Dr NGP Research and Educational Trust, KPR Mill and AQUA GROUP were among those represented.
Asharudeen S, Vice President – Products at Vembu Technologies, opened with a short welcome note.
From there, I (Bhavani Shanmugam, Product Manager at Vembu Technologies) took over as host for the rest of the evening.
Setting the tone
I delivered the featured session, “Beyond Compliance: Building Recovery Readiness in the DPDP Era“. It focused on four areas:
- The dates that matter for planning. The DPDP Rules are rolling out in phases, so today’s compliance posture is a moving target, not a finished project.
- DPDP by industry. For each sector in the room, where personal data actually sits, what a breach or a failed recovery looks like there, and which sector rules stack on top of DPDP.
- What to have ready. The evidence a Board or regulator would ask for after an incident, and whether you could produce it on the day.
- Where our products fit. How BDRShield and XDRShield each align to DPDP obligations, covered separately because they solve different problems.
The shift I wanted the room to make was from “are we compliant?” to “what can we prove?”. A recovery time objective written in a policy document is a target. A recovery time you have actually tested is evidence.
The panel: DPDP compliance and data protection in practice
The panel was the highlight of the evening. I moderated it, and on stage with me were four leaders most of the room already knew well:
- Dr. N. Raveendran, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Sakthi Finance Ltd.
- Dr. O. A. Balasubramaniam, Director – IT, Roots Group of Companies
- Biju Velayudhan, Chief Information Officer, G. Kuppuswamy Naidu Memorial Hospital
- Ravishankar Shanmugasundaram, Chief Technical Officer, Kovai Medical Center and Hospital Ltd., and Director – Operations, Aosta India Pvt. Ltd.
Between them, they brought perspectives from finance, manufacturing, healthcare and enterprise technology.
A few points stood out.
Start with a gap assessment. Before any tool or policy, you need a clear picture of how personal data moves through your organisation:
- Where it resides
- What is collected, and why
- Who can access it
- How it is shared
- How long it is kept before it is erased
If you can’t answer these, you can’t say what DPDP requires of you, let alone show that you meet it.
Compliance documents aren’t the finish line. The panel kept coming back to operational preparedness. When a breach or security incident happens, who does what? Are those responsibilities written down and understood before the day? And can your recovery capability actually keep the business running?
Management has to own it. Data protection needs management involvement and investment. It is a business priority, not just an IT responsibility.
Then we showed the work
Pranav PK, Product Manager at Vembu Technologies, took the room through a live look at our two products.
BDRShield covers backup, disaster recovery and cyber resilience. XDRShield covers endpoint detection and response. Each one was shown in action rather than as a list of features.
DPDP Explained, in every attendee’s kit
Every attendee took home a copy of DPDP Explained, our book on the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and the DPDP Rules, 2025. It’s written to help Indian businesses understand the law and prepare for it, with checklists teams can put to use.
What the room told us
Here’s some of what attendees told us:
- “The event was indeed very insightful and useful.”
- “Very good. Most useful information from panelists on DPDP.”
- “Informative; learned from others’ experience and their pros & cons.”
- “Eye opening session for DPDP Act.”
- “Good to get KT from seniors.”
- “Eye opener & clarity provided.”
What’s next
Vembu Meet moves to Bengaluru on November 20, 2026. Each edition builds on the last, and together they’re giving us a clearer picture of how Indian businesses are approaching DPDP, data protection and cyber resilience.
If you want DPDP updates, breach trends and recovery-readiness insights between editions, join Cyber Signals by Vembu on WhatsApp.
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