Etienne Lopes takes us through cell-level encryption:
Securing data has always been important but as time goes by, more and more data is available all around us, some of it is considered sensitive data and it becomes a major concern to protect it somehow, in fact in certain cases it is legally mandatory to comply with certain regulations (like GDPR). SQL Server offers a few options regarding data protection (either by means of encryption or obfuscation), cell level encryption being one of them.
In this post I’ll explain what is cell level encryption along with its use cases and I’ll use a thorough demo to show how to implement it in a database and how it works
Despite Always Encrypted being available, I’m more apt to use column-level/cell-level encryption because it’s easier to implement. Well, that and the lack of Always Encrypted in Azure Synapse Analytics.