Operational SaaS holds the data that runs a business — payroll, customer records, incident reports, financials. That comes with baseline expectations that are non-negotiable, not premium add-ons.
The baseline: least-privilege access on every table, row-level security enforced in the database rather than the application, audit trails that can't be edited by the people they audit, secrets managed outside the codebase, and a clear, tested plan for what happens when — not if — a credential leaks.
Beyond the baseline, the security mindset shows up in a hundred small decisions. Do we log this field? Do we need this integration to have write access, or is read enough? What does this endpoint do if called ten thousand times a second? Security isn't a feature you add at the end. It's a habit that shapes every design review.