Karan Gulati (SSAS Maestro)

Description: Customer asking if AS supports TDE like encryption we got in SQL Engine.

Solution:

SSAS doesn’t support any data encryption on disk, in simple words – SSAS doesn’t do any kind of encryption.

What it supports:

HTTPS –

You can use Analysis Services using PUMP and configure pump with HTTPS

Windows File System encryption  –

You can use Windows File System encryption (Windows Server 2003) or BitLocker (on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2) to encrypt the drive used to store cubes. Be careful, though; encrypting MOLAP data can have a big impact on performance, especially during processing and schema modification of the cube. We have seen performance drops of up to 50 percent when processing dimensions on encrypted drives though less so for fact processing. Weigh the requirement to encrypt data carefully against the desired performance characteristics of the cube.

References:

Encrypting File System in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003

BitLocker Drive Encryption

Use ROLAP partitions –

Use ROLAP for very confidential data and store the data in a TDE encrypted Database.

Caveat – ROLAP comes with its Performance cost, so keep that in mind.