Today we have a guest editorial from John Magnabosco.
What if Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) was available in Standard Edition? Businesses of all sizes store and process sensitive data. The loss and theft of sensitive data is not exclusive to large enterprise applications. It would be a fairly safe bet that smaller businesses are targeted more frequently due to their less advanced protection methods (or in some cases no protection at all).
What if TDE was available in Standard Edition? A stolen backup tape will be rendered useless without the appropriate key hierarchy in place. Instead of the theif bathing in the slew of credit card numbers that they have lifted, they would receive an error. The company is protected, the customers are protected. Our global data environment is a much safer place.
Our sensitive information is in the hands of businesses of all sizes.You shouldn’t have to be a large company with a large budget to create a secure environment. TDE should be considered a basic security feature and therefore included in Standard Edition. Enterprise Edition features have trickled down to Standard Edition as recently as SQL Server 2008 R2 with the backup compression feature. It is my hope that TDE will soon follow suit.
