When Should You Encrypt Data?

In most cases, you encrypt sensitive data on your site to meet a regulatory compliance. For example, sensitive data such as credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, or patient health information must be encrypted.

Historically, users have wanted to encrypt data because they want to restrict data access from their database administrators. However, this problem is more of an access control problem, not an encryption problem. You can address this problem by using Oracle Database Vault to control the access to your application data from database administrators.