Understanding Encrypted fields in the Raisers Edge NXT

Venky Immadisetty

Hi All,
I am trying to understand the encrypted fields in Raisers Edge NXT.
Let us assume the SSN is as shown below.

I saved the record and opened again, but I can still see the information in the SSN field. Where does it encrypt? Will it encrypt the field in the nightly back up? Will the nightly back up show the SSN like this ?

They also said the birthdate is an encrypted field. Could anyone look at their nightly backup and let me know how does the birthdate and SSN look, whether encrypted or not encrypted?

We are planning to use the nightly back up files in the future and perform some transformations on the data using the birthdate field. So, I am curious to know more about the encryption fields ?

Thanks
Venky

Alex Wong

@Venky Immadisetty
Going to need Blackbaud folks to confirm, but I think encrypted fields means the information is encrypted at rest, meaning it is stored as encrypted data in the database (SQL server). RE has the decryption key that can decrypt and show you the values of the field when you are using RE. If some “bad actor” just took a copy of the RE database and try to “read” it, it will not be possible.