What is the advantage of Tokenization over Database encryption? 

What is the advantage of Tokenization over Database encryption? 

Tokenization is format-preserving and portable. This means that data can be tokenized (encrypted with FF1) once upon generation or ingestion and then be copied internally or shared externally as needed.

Most applications that do not need access to sensitive fields can use the tokenized data as-is. However, the small set of applications that might need access to sensitive fields can decrypt the tokenized data on the fly to obtain the original values.

As database encryption is not format-preserving, such data must be decrypted and masked on each read operation. Further, you will need to decrypt and re-encrypt data as it moves from one data store to the next: from a transactional database to an analytical database.

Tokenization requires some upfront low-code development in the application or in an ETL pipeline node to tokenize the data. Still, the low initial effort provides greater ongoing benefits than database encryption.