Important Notes Concerning Field Level Encryption

Review the following considerations before enabling encryption for a particular field:

• When you enable encryption for a particular field, Aptify encrypts the field for all existing records in the entity. If the entity has millions of records, it may take an hour or more to complete the encryption process (depending on the processing power of your server). Also, no transactional activity should take place during the encryption operation to avoid potential conflicts. Therefore, Aptify strongly recommends that you only perform encryption and decryption operations after hours when no one is using the system.
• The encryption process expands data. Therefore, you may need to increase the SQL Data Size within the entity to accommodate the encrypted data.
• If in doubt, perform a test prior to deployment by enabling encryption on a test entity and then attempting to save a record with data of the expected length in an encrypted field. An error message will appear in the Session Exceptions viewer that reports the number of characters needed in the encrypted field, as shown in the example below. If data already exists in the field when you attempt to encrypt it and the field size is too small, the entity save will fail and a corresponding error is logged to the Session Exceptions viewer.
  
  
• Consider the potential consequences of encrypting a field, such as how this change may impact other fields and entities, before enabling this feature. For example, encrypting the Persons entity's First Name will create a meaningless NameWCompany composite field. Therefore, to minimize unintended side effects, encrypt only those fields that require encryption per the organization's security policy.
• Standard reports run from the Report wizard do not decrypt encrypted fields. Therefore, encrypted text will appear as a string of meaningless characters in reports that include an encrypted field.
• Base Fields do not support encryption. Encryption is enabled on a per-field basis within specific entities.