One of the major downsides of off site SQL Azure data storage is the inability to protect that data from compromise / prying eyes outside of the corporate environment. This has been a blocker for several of my clients who aren't quite yet comfortable trusting the security of Azure and other cloud providers, but want to take advantage of the scalability and cost benefits of using cloud SQL storage.
This percieved need drove the development team at JW Secure into building an Entity Framework based encryption library which makes certain that none of your SQL data is ever exposed outside of the application server. It uses a combination of DPAPI, 256 bit AES keys, and EF to encrypt each cell in SQL with a strong key, which prevents plaintext data from being viewed anywhere but on the application server.
A small sampling of this capability has been transferred to a codeplex library so that others can overcome this problem - see
http://securentity.codeplex.com/. We'd love to get feedback and feature requests so that this can be widely used by cutting edge cloud consumers. Comments??
