If all you want to do is encrypt and decrypt columns in a database for your Grails application, look no further than the Jasypt Encryption plugin.  I have used it in the past to persist PII (personally identifiable information).  However, if you need to access the same data from outside your application, then you need to leverage the built in database encryption functions.  This allows the DBAs to use the built in functions and secret to access data for reports …