Higher education institutions across sub-Saharan Africa have witnessed an unprecedented acceleration in the digitisation of administrative workflows, generating a complex constellation of risks for the custodianship of sensitive student and staff data. Within this evolving landscape, registry units occupy a strategically pivotal position because they aggregate, process, and disseminate confidential records ranging from academic transcripts and admission credentials to disciplinary determinations and statutory documentation. Despite considerable investment in technical safeguards, persistent vulnerabilities continue to be traced not to infrastructural deficits but to the conduct of personnel whose routine practices either reinforce or compromise institutional protective postures. This review synthesises a substantial body of behavioural, organisational, and policy-oriented scholarship to articulate how cognitive predispositions, normative pressures, deterrent perceptions, and self-efficacy beliefs collectively shape compliant or non-compliant action among administrative officers in Nigerian universities. Drawing upon protection motivation theory, the theory of planned behaviour, general deterrence theory, and social cognitive theory, the analysis foregrounds the role of awareness as both a cognitive resource and a culturally mediated practice that requires deliberate cultivation through structured interventions. Particular attention is devoted to the Nigerian regulatory environment, including provisions emerging from data-protection instruments and sectoral guidelines that articulate normative expectations for safeguarding personal information. The synthesis identifies recurrent determinants of behavioural lapses, including weak managerial commitment, inadequate training cadence, infrastructural fragility, and contextually distinctive cultural norms. The review concludes with a set of integrated recommendations spanning policy reform, training architecture, leadership engagement, and continuous evaluation, and outlines avenues for empirically grounded research that can test theoretical propositions in the distinctive operational environments of Nigerian higher education.