SQL Information Protection Assists Data Classification, Auditing

• SQL Information Protection can help organizations discover and classify potentially sensitive data stored in SQL Server databases.
• The features provide guidance and simplify tagging database columns, but they do not actually protect or secure the data.

SQL Information Protection is a set of data discovery, data classification, and reporting features to help identify and tag sensitive data stored in SQL Server databases. The illustration shows a report for a database, after the tool has identified and classified all columns containing sensitive data.

The features can help organizations meet data privacy and regulatory compliance requirements and assist with auditing efforts. However, the features are for data classification and reporting only. They do not apply SQL Server security techniques, such as data encryption and data masking to protect the actual data, nor do they configure SQL Server auditing features that track access to sensitive data, which is a critical part of compliance.