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Disadvantages of field encryption

Many customers see field encryption as a highly desirable feature. Most security policies need personal or other protected data to be properly secured, and field-level encryption is a feature that may help in some circumstances. For example, an HR team may want to ensure that unauthorized people cannot see certain private information. However, field-level encryption does suffer from some significant disadvantages:

• The only field type is a large multiline text field.
• Encrypted fields cannot be used in a list to filter or sort records.
• The data in an encrypted field is not exportable from a list.

Encrypted fields are accessible through web services; this gives us an alternative data-extraction technique. ...