Glossary
Service Account
A service account gives a piece of software its own identity, separate from any individual person's, so that automated processes — scheduled jobs, background workers, one service calling another — have something to authenticate as. Because no person is present to type a password or approve a prompt when these processes run, service accounts typically rely on long-lived credentials or certificates rather than interactive authentication.
That same absence of a human in the loop is what makes service accounts a frequent source of standing access: because nobody is inconvenienced by a service account's broad permissions day to day, they tend to accumulate scope over time in a way a human's own access, subject to more regular review, often does not.