Why Secure Data in your Windows MSSQL database?

Databases often contain sensitive financial, healthcare, and corporate data. As mentioned earlier, data security breaches are occurring at an alarming rate and international legislations have been passed, which set regulations on how organizations must protect this sensitive data. The Payment Card Industry (PCI), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), and the UK Data Protection Act are just a few of these regulations. Several regulations require that sensitive data be encrypted and that organization’s must identify and report data disclosure or misuse. If these regulations are not followed, organizations can face serious repercussions, ranging from financial penalties to imprisonment of responsible parties. Depending on the nature of your business, the above regulations may not apply, but before you discount the need to encrypt data

consider that sensitive information can also include corporate information including confidential HR data, trade secrets, patents, designs, or client listings, which, if disclosed to unauthorized individuals, could have a grave impact on your organization. At this point you may be wondering,“why not just encrypt all data using a secure algorithm?” instead of determining specifically what data elements require encryption.The answer is that there is a  significant performance impact when encrypting data, as SQL Server must perform authentication, encryption, and decryption functions seamlessly to encrypt and decrypt the data. In addition, there are several other side effects associated with data encryption, which we will touch on later in this chapter. For these reasons, you should use data encryption only when required and only on the required data elements.

Ways to encrypt data in MSSQL 2005:

EFS Encryption
Native SQL Server 2005 Encryption
Using Keys to Encrypt Data
Using Certificates to Encrypt Data
Using Pass Phrases to Encrypt Data
Working with Data Encrypted
Indexing Encrypted Data
Replicating Encrypted Data
Symmetric Key Usage Tracking
Replicating Encrypted Stored
Using Endpoint Encryption

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