Another EKM Vendor Announced Support

Good call-out Kevin!  I guess working at Microsoft has made me forget that the rest of the world does not talk in 3-4 letter acronyms:-)  Very bad form, Lara!

Extensible Key Management is the feature released with SQL Server 2008 that allows an organization to leverage an off-box key device for centralized key management and off-box encryption.  This is a very important capability for large organizations which do not want to manage encryption keys on every instance, and prefer to leverage a device to centrally manage key rotation policies and key archival.  This will often provide off-box key encryption and decryption, as well.