Looking at the data, the masked columns appear as they are on disk. This validates Ronit Reger’s statement on his blog post Use Dynamic Data Masking to obfuscate your sensitive data.
* There are no physical changes to the data in the database itself; the data remains intact and is fully available to authorized users or applications.* Note that Dynamic Data Masking is not a replacement for access control mechanisms, and is not a method for physical data encryption.In contrast, the encrypted columns are encrypted on disk and the data types are different on disk compared to how they were defined in the table schema – SSN is defined with nvarchar(11) while CreditCardNumber is defined with nvarchar(25). This means that those “valuables” are even more secured on disk, requiring additional layers of security just to get access to them.
Read the whole thing.