Nick Thomas-Symonds says a 30% discount for the UK’s participation in EU scheme has been agreed

Streeting says he does not want people to stay away from hospitals today if they need emergency medical help.

The most important message that I want us all to convey collectively as, as parliament and the NHS, is to the public’ I do not want people who need to access health care to think [they’d] better not try.

So if it’s an accident or an emergency, people should have access.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Andrew Fox/Alamy

© Photograph: Andrew Fox/Alamy

© Photograph: Andrew Fox/Alamy

Shashank Bajpai, CISO & CTSO at Yotta 2026 is the execution year for India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) regime , the Rules were notified in November 2025 and the government has signalled a phased enforcement timeline. The law is consent-centric, imposes heavy penalties (up to ₹250 crore for the most serious security failures), creates a new institutional stack (Data Protection Board, Consent Managers), and elevates privacy to boardroom priority. Organizations that treat compliance as a strategic investment, not a cost centre, will gain trust, operational resilience, and competitive advantage. Key themes for 2026: consent at scale, data minimization, hardened security, vendor accountability, and new dependency risks arising from Consent Manager infrastructure.

Why 2026 Matters

The DPDP Act (2023) becomes operational through Rules notified in November 2025; the result is a staggered compliance timetable that places 2026 squarely in the execution phase. That makes 2026 the inflection year when planning becomes measurable operational work and when regulators will expect visible progress. The practical effect is immediate: companies must move from policy documents to implemented consent systems, security controls, breach workflows, and vendor governance.

The High-Impact Obligations

• Explicit consent architecture: Consent must be free, specific, informed and obtained by clear affirmative action. Systems must record, revoke and propagate consent signals reliably.
• Data minimization & purpose limitation: Collect only what’s necessary and purge data when the purpose is fulfilled.
• Reasonable security safeguards: Highest penalty bracket (up to ₹250 crore) for failures to implement required security measures. Encryption, tokenization, RBAC, monitoring and secure third-party contracts are expected.
• Breach notification: Obligatory notification to the Data Protection Board and affected principals, with tight timelines (public guidance references 72-hour reporting windows for board notification).
• Data subject rights: Access, correction, erasure, withdrawal of consent and grievance mechanisms must be operational and auditable.
• Children’s data: Verifiable parental consent and prohibitions on behavioural profiling/targeted advertising toward minors; failures risk very high penalties.
• Consent Managers: New regulated intermediaries where individuals may centrally manage consent; only India-incorporated entities meeting financial/operational thresholds (minimum net worth indicated in Rules) can register. This constructs a new privacy infrastructure and a new dependency vector for data fiduciaries.

Implementation Challenges & Strategic Opportunities

1. Key Implementation Challenges

Challenge Area	What Will Break / Strain in 2026	Why It Matters to Leadership	Strategic Imperative
Regulatory Ambiguity & Evolving Interpretation	Unclear operational expectations around “informed consent,” Significant Data Fiduciary designation, and cross-border data transfers	Risk of over-engineering or non-compliance as regulatory guidance evolves	Build modular, configurable privacy architectures that can adapt without re-platforming
Legacy Systems & Distributed Data	Difficulty retrofitting consent enforcement, encryption, audit trails, and real-time controls into legacy and batch-oriented systems	High cost, operational disruption, and extended timelines for compliance	Prioritize modernization of high-risk systems and align vendor roadmaps with DPDP requirements
Organizational Governance & Talent Gaps	Privacy cuts across legal, product, engineering, HR, procurement—often without clear ownership; shortage of experienced DPOs	Fragmented accountability increases regulatory and breach risk	Establish cross-functional privacy governance; leverage fractional DPOs and external advisors while building internal capability
Children’s Data & Onboarding Friction	Age verification and parental consent slow user onboarding and impact conversion metrics	Direct revenue and growth impact if UX is not carefully redesigned	Re-engineer onboarding flows to balance compliance with user experience, especially in consumer platforms
Consent Manager Dependency & Systemic Risk	Outages or breaches at registered Consent Managers can affect multiple data fiduciaries simultaneously	Creates concentration and third-party systemic risk	Design fallback mechanisms, redundancy plans, and enforce strong SLAs and audit rights

 2. Strategic Opportunities: Turning Compliance into Advantage

Opportunity Area	Business Value	Strategic Outcome
Trust as a Market Differentiator	Privacy becomes a competitive trust signal, particularly in fintech, healthtech, and BFSI ecosystems.	Strong DPDP compliance enhances brand equity, customer loyalty, partner confidence, and investor perception.
Operational Efficiency & Risk Reduction	Data minimization, encryption, and segmentation reduce storage costs and limit breach blast radius.	Privacy investments double as technical debt reduction with measurable ROI and lower incident recovery costs.
Global Market Access	Alignment with global privacy principles simplifies cross-border expansion and compliance-sensitive partnerships.	Faster deal closures, reduced due diligence friction, and improved access to regulated international markets.
Domestic Privacy & RegTech Ecosystem Growth	Demand for Consent Managers, RegTech, and privacy engineering solutions creates a new domestic market.	Strategic opportunity for Indian vendors to lead in privacy infrastructure and export DPDP-aligned solutions globally.

DPDP Readiness Roadmap for 2026

Time Horizon	Key Actions	Primary Owners	Strategic Outcome
Immediate (0–3 Months)	• Establish Board-level Privacy Steering Committee •Appoint or contract a Data Protection Officer (DPO) • Conduct rapid enterprise data mapping (repositories, processors, high-risk data flows) • Triage high-risk systems for encryption, access controls, and logging • Update breach response runbooks to meet Board and individual notification timelines	Board, CEO, CISO, Legal, Compliance	Executive accountability for privacy; clear visibility of data risk exposure; regulatory-ready breach response posture
Short Term (3–9 Months)	• Deploy consent management platform interoperable with upcoming Consent Managers • Standardize DPDP-compliant vendor contracts and initiate bulk vendor renegotiation/audits • Automate data principal request handling (identity verification, APIs, evidence trails)	CISO, CTO, Legal, Procurement, Product	Operational DPDP compliance at scale; reduced manual handling risk; strengthened third-party governance
Medium Term (9–18 Months)	• Implement data minimization and archival policies focused on high-sensitivity datasets • Embed Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) into product development (“privacy by design”) • Stress-test reliance on Consent Managers and negotiate resilience SLAs and contingency plans	Product, Engineering, CISO, Risk, Procurement	Sustainable compliance architecture; reduced long-term data liability; privacy-integrated product innovation
Ongoing (Board Dashboard Metrics)	• Consent fulfillment latency & revocation success rate • Mean time to detect and notify data breaches (aligned to regulatory windows) • % of sensitive data encrypted at rest and in transit • Vendor compliance score and DPA coverage	Board, CISO, Risk & Compliance	Continuous assurance, measurable compliance maturity, and defensible regulatory posture

Board-Level Takeaway

DPDP compliance in 2026 is not a one-time legal exercise, it is an operating model change. Organizations that treat privacy as a board-governed, product-integrated, and metrics-driven discipline will outperform peers on regulatory trust, customer confidence, and incident resilience.

The Macro View: Data Sovereignty & Trust Infrastructure

The Rules reinforce India’s intention to control flows of citizen data while creating domestic privacy infrastructure (DPB + Consent Managers + data auditors). This is not just regulation; it is an economic strategy to build domestic capability in cloud, identity, security and RegTech, and to position India as a credible participant in global data governance conversations.

Act Strategically, Not Reactively

DPDP is a structural shift: it will change products, engineering practices, contracts, and customer expectations. 2026 will reveal winners and laggards. Those that embrace privacy as a governance discipline and a product differentiator will realize measurable advantages in trust, operational resilience, and market value. The alternative, waiting until enforcement escalates, risks fines, reputational harm and erosion of customer trust. (This article reflects the author’s analysis and personal viewpoints and is intended for informational purposes only. It should not be construed as legal or regulatory advice.)

Learn the top strategies to secure customer data when expanding internationally, from MFA and encryption to compliance, SIEM, and scalable security partners.

The post Top 7 Strategies for Securing Customer Data While Expanding Your Business Internationally appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Encryption can protect data at rest and data in transit, but does nothing for data in use. What we have are secure enclaves. I’ve written about this before:

Almost all cloud services have to perform some computation on our data. Even the simplest storage provider has code to copy bytes from an internal storage system and deliver them to the user. End-to-end encryption is sufficient in such a narrow context. But often we want our cloud providers to be able to perform computation on our raw data: search, analysis, AI model training or fine-tuning, and more. Without expensive, esoteric techniques, such as secure multiparty computation protocols or homomorphic encryption techniques that can perform calculations on encrypted data, cloud servers require access to the unencrypted data to do anything useful.

Fortunately, the last few years have seen the advent of general-purpose, hardware-enabled secure computation. This is powered by special functionality on processors known as trusted execution environments (TEEs) or secure enclaves. TEEs decouple who runs the chip (a cloud provider, such as Microsoft Azure) from who secures the chip (a processor vendor, such as Intel) and from who controls the data being used in the computation (the customer or user). A TEE can keep the cloud provider from seeing what is being computed. The results of a computation are sent via a secure tunnel out of the enclave or encrypted and stored. A TEE can also generate a signed attestation that it actually ran the code that the customer wanted to run.

Secure enclaves are critical in our modern cloud-based computing architectures. And, of course, they have vulnerabilities:

The most recent attack, released Tuesday, is known as TEE.fail. It defeats the latest TEE protections from all three chipmakers. The low-cost, low-complexity attack works by placing a small piece of hardware between a single physical memory chip and the motherboard slot it plugs into. It also requires the attacker to compromise the operating system kernel. Once this three-minute attack is completed, Confidential Compute, SEV-SNP, and TDX/SDX can no longer be trusted. Unlike the Battering RAM and Wiretap attacks from last month—which worked only against CPUs using DDR4 memory—TEE.fail works against DDR5, allowing them to work against the latest TEEs.

Yes, these attacks require physical access. But that’s exactly the threat model secure enclaves are supposed to secure against.

Here’s the summary:

We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate and government communications, private citizens’ voice calls and SMS, and consumer Internet traffic from in-flight wifi and mobile networks. This data can be passively observed by anyone with a few hundred dollars of consumer-grade hardware. There are thousands of geostationary satellite transponders globally, and data from a single transponder may be visible from an area as large as 40% of the surface of the earth.

Full paper. News article.