A documented procedure for detecting, containing, notifying, and recovering from personal data breach incidents.
An incident response plan is a structured document defining how an organisation detects, responds to, and recovers from data breach incidents. Under DPDPA, the plan must ensure breach notification to the Board and affected Data Principals within 72 hours. Key components include: detection mechanisms, severity classification, containment procedures, forensic investigation steps, notification templates and workflows, communication protocols, recovery procedures, and post-incident review processes.
Without a tested incident response plan, the 72-hour notification deadline is nearly impossible to meet. The chaos of an active breach without a plan leads to delayed notifications, incomplete forensics, and maximum penalty exposure.
A Pune SaaS company's incident response plan defines: on-call security engineer (24/7 PagerDuty), automatic alert triage within 1 hour, severity classification matrix, pre-drafted Board notification templates, customer communication templates, and mandatory post-incident retrospective within 7 days.
Having a plan document is not enough — it must be tested. Regular tabletop exercises and breach simulations ensure the team can actually execute the plan under pressure within the 72-hour window.
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