Both Google and Amazon offer encryption at rest for their databases, but the more granular control afforded by Azure is limited by the underlying database products in use. Amazon RDS is the ...

Learn More. Microsoft’s cloud customers can now more easily encrypt their databases with this week’s release of the new Azure SQL Database Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) feature.

While there are no major new TDE features in SQL Server 2012, Microsoft has upped the ante by enabling the database master keys to use the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256 encryption algorithm.

Billed as a database-as-a-service offering, Azure SQL Data Warehouse is Microsoft's enterprise-focused storage solution that scales both computing power and storage space based on need.