> It doesn't really matter. The fact is that you're one CVE away from every employee having access to arbitrary data, including financial data. I feel a bit like a broken record saying this.

Sure, but it's the same with pretty much any other app architecture.

Either your app has all the data access and you put your access control there, or you do the access control in the database. There really aren't other options here. There isn't access control defense in depth here. The best you can really do is do some data encryption of the data in the tables. We do some of that, but it's such a PITA that we relegate it to special stuff only.

> especially as SSO is rarely implemented with one policy - there's device attestation, 2FA, etc.

Sure but ALL of that relies on the SSO system behaving as advertised, so you think of it as separate policies, but it really isn't. It's once SSO CVE away from giving away the store. We use SSO with PG, that's how they authenticate to PG, we are fans of SSO too.