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Encryption Features in SQL Server

Matthew McGiffen gives us a high-level overview of what’s available in terms of encryption in SQL Server:

SQL Server has had the native ability to encrypt data since SQL Server 2005. This included functionality that could be used to encrypt individual items and columns of data as well as the Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) feature which was available with the enterprise edition of SQL Server and could be used to encrypt all data where it is stored on disk. We then didn’t see significant additions to the features available for encryption until 2016 when Microsoft added Always Encrypted for column encryption. In SQL Server 2019 Microsoft made TDE available in standard edition, and also in SQL Server 2019 the ability to use enclaves was added to Always Encrypted to improve the available functionality for interacting with encrypted data. Finally in SQL Server 2022 further enhancements were made to the set of functionality available when working with Always Encrypted with enclaves.

Click through for a table and some details.