Glossary
Break-Glass Account
A break-glass account exists for the specific scenario where every normal path to critical access has failed — the identity provider is down, the usual approvers are unreachable, the on-call engineer's own account is locked out. It is meant to sit unused for long stretches, which is itself the operational challenge: an account that's rarely exercised is easy to forget about, easy to leave with stale credentials, and easy to leave unmonitored precisely because nothing about it comes up in day-to-day operations.
A break-glass account worth having comes with its own explicit controls despite being an emergency measure: every use is logged and alerts immediately, its credentials are rotated and tested on a schedule even though they're not used, and using it triggers a mandatory review after the fact rather than disappearing into ordinary activity.