# RDS for SQL Server's TDE Restore Now Works on Multi-AZ!

Hey everyone, it's me! I found a nice update for Amazon RDS for SQL Server, so let's dive in!

## What was announced?

According to AWS What's New, Amazon RDS for SQL Server backups with TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) enabled can now be restored directly onto Multi-AZ instances, as well as instances configured with a read replica in the same region.

Here's the workflow:

- Back up your existing TDE certificate and store it in Amazon S3
- Restore that certificate to an RDS instance with the TDE option enabled
- Use RDS native backup and restore to restore the TDE-enabled database backup from S3

This is available in every AWS Region where Amazon RDS for SQL Server is supported!

## The story so far

Until now, restoring a TDE-enabled database was only supported on Single-AZ instances. If you wanted to bring an encrypted backup into a Multi-AZ or read-replica setup, you had to either disable TDE first or migrate to a Single-AZ configuration before restoring, a real hassle for teams that need encryption at rest.

## What changes

You can now keep TDE encryption and Multi-AZ high availability at the same time, all the way through backup and restore. That makes disaster recovery and cross-region migration workflows much simpler for anyone running SQL Server on RDS with encryption requirements.

## Wrap-up

- TDE-enabled databases can now be restored directly onto Multi-AZ and read-replica instances
- The flow: back up the certificate, store it in S3, restore it to RDS, then restore the database with native backup and restore
- Available in every AWS Region where RDS for SQL Server is supported
- Great news if you run TDE-encrypted SQL Server workloads on RDS!