Azure SQL Database is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution that offers managed database service. Azure DB provides many features such as automatic database tuning, vulnerability assessment, automated patching, performance tuning, alerts. It provides a 99.995% availability SLA for the Zone redundant database in the business-critical service tier.

This article explores Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) using the customer-managed key in Azure SQL Database.

Introduction

In an on-premise SQL Server instance, database administrators can enable Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) for securing the data and log files of a database. It is helpful to protect you from a malicious threat by encrypting data at rest. You get real-time encryption of the database, transaction log files and associated backup files without any configuration changes at the application end.

The high-level steps for implementing the TDE encryption are as below.

• Create Master Key
• Configure a Certificate protected by the master key
• Create Database Encryption Key
• Enable Encryption
• Backup Certificate
• Restoring a Certificate

In the following image, we can visualize the TDE hierarchy. If you are new to TDE, you can refer to the following articles to get familiar with TDE.

Azure SQL DB TDE using Service Managed Key

If you migrate your on-premise databases to Azure SQL Database, TDE is enabled by default. You can connect to the Azure portal and verify the configuration. It uses an Azure service managed key. It is Azure responsibility to manage the key without any user intervention. Microsoft automatically uses its internal security policy for rotating these certificates. It protects the certificate root key using its internal secret store.

As shown below, my [labazuresql] database is encrypted using the Transparent data encryption.

#azure #sql azure #azure sql database #azure sql #customer-managed