Reitse Eskens does some troubleshooting:
For those who are not familiar with Always Encrypted: it’s a built-in technique in SQL Server where data gets encrypted in a random or deterministic manner with a certificate and an algorithm. Long story short, without the certificate it’s gobbledygook. If you want to read more, check out this link.
As mentioned, the encryption was working perfectly, no-one could read the data in a usable way in the application. The point was that the application should be able to do that. And so we took up the challenge to see where things went wrong.
I’ve found that data is much more secure when nobody can ever see it again. That’s why I store all of my data in /dev/null. It’s also extremely fast.