"The certificate chain was issued by an authority that is not trusted" when connecting DB in VM Role from Azure website

Question

You likely don't have a CA signed certificate installed in your SQL VM's trusted root store.

If you have Encrypt=True in the connection string, either set that to off (not recommended), or add the following in the connection string:

TrustServerCertificate=True

SQL Server will create a self-signed certificate if you don't install one for it to use, but it won't be trusted by the caller since it's not CA-signed, unless you tell the connection string to trust any server cert by default.

Long term, I'd recommend leveraging Let's Encrypt to get a CA signed certificate from a known trusted CA for free, and install it on the VM. Don't forget to set it up to automatically refresh. You can read more on this topic in SQL Server books online under the topic of "Encryption Hierarchy", and "Using Encryption Without Validation".

If you're using SQL Management Studio, please goto connection properties and click on "Trust server certificated"

If you're seeing this error message when attempting to connect using SSMS, add TrustServerCertificate=True to the Additional Connection Parameters.

If You are trying to access it through Data Connections in Visual Studio 2015, and getting the above Error, Then Go to Advanced and set TrustServerCertificate=True for error to go away.

I got this Issue while importing Excel data into SQLDatabase through SSMS. The solution is to set TrustServerCertificate = True in the security section

Got hit by the same issue while accessing SQLServer from IIS. Adding TrustServerCertificate=True didnot help.

Could see a comment in MS docs: Make sure the SQLServer service account has access to the TLS Certificate you are using. (NT Service\MSSQLSERVER)

Open personal store and right click on the certificate -> manage private keys -> Add the SQL service account and give full control.

Restart the SQL service. It worked.

While the general answer was in itself correct, I found it did not go far enough for my SQL Server Import and Export Wizard orientated issue. Assuming you have a valid (and automatic) Windows Security based login:

ConnectionString

Data Source=localhost; 
Initial Catalog=<YOUR DATABASE HERE>; 
Integrated Security=True; 
Encrypt=True; 
TrustServerCertificate=True; 
User Instance=False

That can either be your complete ConnectionString (all on one line), or you can apply those values individually to their fields.