We are building an application using .NET and SQL Server 2012. Currently it works fine. For some new changes we want to encrypt few sensitive columns in the tables and also want to move the to SQL Azure.
Was Googling and found that SQL Server 2016 has a new feature - "Always Encrypted" which requires .NET 4.6 & SSMS version to be 13.0+
Now that I am using SQL Server 2012 is there a way to make use of Always encrypted feature while moving to Azure? Any workarounds / alternatives / pointers on this would help.
I'm a Program Manager at Microsoft. Just to confirm/add to what Shannon stated:
Always Encrypted is supported in SQL Server 2016 and in Azure SQL Database and the feature is identical on both platforms. Here is a tutorial with an Always Encrypted example for Azure SQL DB: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/sql-database-always-encrypted/.
You can also use Always Encrypted in a SQL Server Virtual Machine in Azure(https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-machines/sql-server/), if you choose to provision SQL Server 2016 in the VM.