Similar to the answer which Julius has given, an option you may consider is using an external Tokenization solution. In this approach, assuming the data in question is entered and stored in an SAP system, the sensitive data you wish to protect is sent to an external server or service provider where it is encrypted and a random "token" is assigned to it. The token is returned to be stored in the SAP database in the same field where the data would have originally been stored.
By using tokenization, you can still access the data by sending the token to the external tokenization server/service and retrieving the original data. However, because the original data does NOT reside in the SAP DB, should there be a data breach or a DBA downloads some SAP tables, only the token will be compromised. In order to retrieve the original data the token must be sent to the server/service. Thus, theft of the token provides little to no value to the thief.
Paymetric offers this tokenization service in SAP. It is possible to tokenize nearly any type of data in SAP that you wish, although credit card numbers tend to be the most commonly tokenized data. That said, there seems to be a surge in the desire to tokenize other sensitive data (PII) in the recent months.
Eric