title: How to prevent hosting provider to have access to sensitive data?
body: <p>Scenario: We have our dedicated servers hosted with a hosting provider. They are running web apps, console apps along with the database which is Sql Server Express edition. </p>
  
  <p>The applications encrypt/decrypt the data to/from the DB. We also store the keys in their server. So theoretically, the hosting provider can access our keys and decrypt our data.  </p>
  
  <p>Question: How we can prevent the hosting providers to access our data? </p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>We don't want hosting provider's users to just log into Sql Server and see the data.</p></li>
  <li><p>We don't want an un-encrypted copy of database files in the box. </p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>To mitigate no. 1: Encrypting app.configs to not store plain text DB username and password. </p>
  
  <p>To mitigate no. 2: Turn on EFS on Sql Server data folder. We could use TDE but the Sql Server is Web Edition version and the hosting company is going to charge us a fortune to use Enterprise Edition. </p>
  
  <p>I'd really appreciate if you guys have any suggestions about above. </p>