A break glass account is a special, privileged emergency access key (or an actual user account, or service account) designed for rare, critical scenarios. You use it when normal sign-in systems fail or when immediate administrative action is required.
The term itself refers to breaking the protective glass to access emergency equipment; these accounts remain dormant under strict controls until an urgent situation demands their use.
Unlike your standard administrative accounts, break glass accounts are designed to bypass typical access control mechanisms to restore system functionality during outages, security incidents, or infrastructure failures.
How Break Glass Accounts Work
Break glass accounts appear across multiple layers of enterprise infrastructure:
- Cloud Environments: These are root-level IAM roles with broad permissions across AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Kubernetes Clusters: They are Cluster-admin service accounts capable of overriding namespace restrictions.
- CI/CD Pipelines: They use elevated credentials that can force deployments or rollback changes when automated systems fail.
The defining characteristic? These accounts have substantially more privilege than their regular counterparts and operate outside standard approval workflows. For instance, an Azure break glass account might hold Global Administrator rights across an entire tenant.
For non-human identities (like automated programs), break glass access often means giving a service account cross-environment permissions to authenticate to multiple systems simultaneously, a capability that violates least privilege under normal circumstances but is necessary during a crisis.
Why Break Glass Accounts Matter
If you’re deploying AI agents, microservices, or hybrid cloud workloads, you face a fundamental tension: security demands tight access controls, but operational reality demands emergency overrides when systems fail.
The stakes are high because your infrastructure is more automated than ever. Any service could crash at 3am, and a break glass account gets you in with a high level of privilege to fix it. When a misconfigured policy locks out all regular admin accounts, break glass is the only way back in.
Modern enterprises struggle with break glass access for non-human identities. A failed deployment pipeline needs emergency credentials to roll back changes. A compromised API key requires immediate rotation across dozens of services. These scenarios demand privileged access for automated systems, not just human administrators.
This challenge is even tougher in regulated industries. Financial services must prove they can respond quickly while maintaining complete audit trails, and healthcare needs access without violating HIPAA logging requirements.
Common Challenges with Break Glass Accounts
Implementing these emergency access requirements creates significant security and operational challenges:
- Identity verification during emergencies: Standard multi-factor authentication becomes a liability when the MFA system itself fails, leaving organizations without reliable methods to verify legitimate emergency access requests.
- Preventing unauthorized activation: These accounts exist outside standard security controls by design, making them attractive targets for attackers who want persistent privileged access disguised as emergency credentials.
- Maintaining audit compliance: Emergency access happens during high-stress incidents when documentation takes a backseat to restoration, making it nearly impossible to reconstruct access patterns without automated logging.
- Managing credential sprawl: Organizations create break glass accounts reactively across systems and environments, building an ungoverned shadow infrastructure of privileged credentials.
- Balancing accessibility with security: Store credentials too securely and responders can’t access them during actual emergencies. Make them too accessible and they become shortcuts around proper access management.
- Coordinating across distributed teams: Global organizations struggle to define who can activate break glass access and under what circumstances without clear governance frameworks.
How Aembit Helps
Aembit turns break glass from a risky static credential into a controlled, identity-verified, time-bound access event, preserving security while still enabling rapid recovery.
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FAQ
You Have Questions?
We Have Answers.
What's the difference between a break glass account vs emergency access account?
Break glass accounts bypass normal authentication entirely to restore access during system failures, while emergency access accounts follow expedited approval processes with elevated privileges. Break glass implies breaking through all controls, whereas emergency access maintains some security workflow.
How often should break glass accounts be tested?
Test break glass procedures quarterly at minimum, with full activation drills annually. Without regular testing, credentials often fail during actual emergencies when you need them most.
Can organizations use break glass accounts for non-human identities like AI agents?
Yes, but implementation differs significantly from human emergency access. Instead of storing static credentials, implement policy-based systems that dynamically provision elevated permissions when specific incident conditions occur, then revoke them immediately.
What's the biggest security risk with break glass accounts?
Emergency accounts frequently become routine shortcuts when teams discover they bypass tedious approval workflows. This transforms a controlled security exception into an unmonitored privilege escalation path used for convenience rather than genuine emergencies.