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@article{189850,
        author = {Varun N Rao and Narendra Vijayasimha},
        title = {Data Mapping as Architecture: Reframing Privacy Compliance under Global Data Protection Regimes and India’s DPDP Act},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {8},
        pages = {281-297},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=189850},
        abstract = {As privacy regulations expand globally, organizations continue to struggle with compliance despite significant investments in legal and governance frameworks. This paper argues that these failures are not primarily regulatory or procedural, but architectural in nature. Focusing on data mapping as a core systems-engineering challenge, the study analyses enforcement outcomes under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California’s Consumer Privacy Act and Privacy Rights Act (CCPA/CPRA), and Brazil’s Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD). Across jurisdictions, compliance breakdowns consistently arise from limited data visibility within complex, distributed, and continuously evolving information systems.
The paper demonstrates that conventional compliance tools like static documentation, spreadsheet-based inventories, and periodic audits, are technically incompatible with modern data architectures built on cloud platforms, microservices, analytics pipelines, and third-party integrations. These tools fail to capture runtime data behaviour, resulting in systemic blind spots that undermine security controls, rights execution, and accountability mechanisms.
Extending these findings to India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP Act), the paper reframes privacy compliance as a design problem in systems engineering. It proposes an innovative, cost-aware architectural framework that embeds automated data mapping, telemetry, and policy-as-code into enterprise systems. By treating data mapping as a continuous control plane rather than a compliance artifact, the framework enables scalable, resilient, and economically sustainable privacy compliance for digital enterprises.},
        keywords = {Data Mapping; Privacy Compliance Architecture; Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP); Data Governance and Accountability; Continuous Compliance Systems},
        month = {January},
        }