Rick Dobson encrypts a column:
I was recently assigned to work on a team who will implement column-level encryption and decryption solutions in SQL Server. Please introduce the basics of SQL Server encryption and decryption features. Also, provide a series of T-SQL samples for encrypting and decrypting data within the columns of a SQL Server table.
Always Encrypted can be better for the job, but sometimes, development or product limitations require using old-school column-level (or “cell-level” as people have called it) encryption. And it still works fine for the purpose of encrypting important data at rest.