Break Glass Account Management Best Practices

Updated November 2026

In today's multi-cloud environments, organizations face growing challenges in managing privileged access securely. Break glass accounts are crucial for administrative access, but if mishandled, they can introduce significant security risks to your organization.

The number of identities that might need emergency access is growing, too. Pipelines, service accounts, and AI agents now carry out more operational work, and every one that keeps elevated access between incidents is another target.

In this blog, we'll discuss best practices for managing break glass accounts in multi-cloud and hybrid environments, how to separate the few accounts that must always exist from the access that doesn't need to, and how to keep emergency access available, secure, and provable.

What Are Break Glass Accounts, and Why Are They Important? 

Break glass accounts, also known as emergency or global admin accounts, are accounts with privileged access, often reserved for emergency situations when normal admin access is unavailable. They're important for disaster recovery, ensuring that teams can quickly regain control and restore operations in the event of an outage or incident.

Some organizations refer to any admin account in a production environment as break glass due to the nature of their privileges and their ability to bypass standard security controls. Regardless of the definition, break glass accounts are high-risk assets that must be tightly controlled through robust access policies and procedures.

Misuse, abuse, or compromise of break glass accounts with static, highly privileged access could lead to breaches with catastrophic consequences and significant data exposure. Misconfigured or exposed accounts with admin-level permissions are common causes of breaches, allowing attackers to move laterally into sensitive environments.

Managing Break Glass Accounts Across Clouds 

Managing break glass and other privileged accounts only becomes more complex across multi-cloud environments. Each cloud service provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, and others) has its own identity and access control model, increasing the chances of permission drift and inconsistent policy enforcement.

A single oversight in permissions configuration in one cloud environment could introduce vulnerabilities across an organization's entire cloud footprint.

This variation in access policy also makes it difficult to see which identities have privileged access to sensitive data. Security, IT, cloud, and other technical teams struggle to make sure break glass accounts are both available when needed and secure at all times.

Unifying access management policies, processes, and tools across the environment is critical to maintaining an up-to-date inventory of break glass and other privileged accounts, and to closing blind spots and misconfigurations before an incident exposes them.

Two Kinds of Break Glass Access: Accounts That Must Exist and Access That Doesn't Need To

Not every break glass scenario needs a standing account. It helps to separate two cases.

The first is the true last resort: an account that has to work when everything else is down, including your identity provider. AWS root users and Microsoft Entra emergency access accounts fall here. These can't be created on demand, so the goal is to lock them down. Microsoft recommends at least two cloud-only emergency access accounts protected by phishing-resistant MFA, with an alert on every sign-in. AWS recommends MFA on the root user, no root access keys, and keeping root out of everyday work.

The second case covers everything else: the admin access an on-call engineer needs during an outage, a database administrator needs during a failed migration, or a pipeline needs to roll back a bad deploy. This access doesn't have to exist until the incident does. It can be granted when it's needed, scoped to the systems involved, and removed when the incident closes.

Many organizations handle both cases the same way, with standing admin accounts held in reserve. Separating them shrinks always-on emergency access down to the few accounts that genuinely need to exist.

Best Practices for Break Glass Account Management 

While securing break glass and global admin accounts will vary, there are several best practices that can be implemented for secure and effective management: 

• Minimal Use & Limited Access: Break glass accounts should be reserved strictly for scenarios where they must be used such as a last-resort option. This minimizes exposure and potential for misuse. Whoever has access to these accounts should be strictly monitored and their use controlled. 
• Strong Authentication & MFA Integration: Multi-factor authentication (MFA) and conditional access policies should be implemented to add layers of protection, even in the event of emergency access. 
• Isolation & Monitoring: Break glass accounts should be isolated from regular admin accounts. They should be regularly and continuously monitored to flag any suspicious behavior or unauthorized access. 
• Access Control & Approval Workflow: Approval for activation and use of these accounts should be logged and documented to ensure that access is tracked, authorized, and auditable. 
• Record Emergency Sessions: Record what happens during break glass sessions so responders and auditors can see exactly what was done. Live monitoring lets a reviewer watch, lock, or end a session while it's still running.
• Documentation & Communication: Documentation for how these accounts can be used should be regularly maintained and updated. Stakeholders should be aware of the protocols surrounding the use of these accounts to avoid potential confusion during an incident. 
• Periodic Testing: Regular testing of the activation and use of break glass accounts should be done to ensure they function as intended and can be accessed quickly when needed. 
• Eliminate Standing Access: Remove static administrative privileges wherever an account doesn't need to exist between incidents. For the accounts that must stay static, vault the credentials, rotate them after every use, and keep previous versions so a rotation never locks the team out.
• Separation of Duties: Responsibilities for initiating, approving, and using break glass accounts should be separated where possible to mitigate the potential for misuse. 
• Review & Audit: Controls around these accounts should be reviewed and audited regularly to ensure that they’re functioning and enforced correctly.
• Revoke on Risk Signals: If your identity provider or security tools flag a compromised user, emergency access should end immediately. Standards like the OpenID Shared Signals Framework let those signals revoke active access automatically.
• Apply the Same Rules to Non-Human Identities: Service accounts, pipelines, and AI agents need emergency access too. An automation with standing admin rights "in case of emergency" is a break glass account by another name, so apply the same controls.Disable or Limit Remote Access: Restrict remote access to break glass accounts unless absolutely necessary. Ideally, they should be used only from secure, internal networks.

How Britive Supports Break Glass Best Practices

Britive is built to secure privileged access across modern multi-cloud and hybrid environments, with one policy model for every identity and every environment.

Dynamic just-in-time privilege granting eliminates standing privileges by providing access only when it's needed and automatically revoking it after a set period of time, even for emergency scenarios. Emergency access can require a Jira or ServiceNow ticket or PagerDuty on-call status, and can be approved in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or by email.

The credentials that must stay static, like cloud root accounts, live in Britive Secrets Manager with rotation and version history. Break glass sessions to servers, databases, and Kubernetes clusters can be recorded and watched live, with the ability to lock or end a session.

Cross-cloud visibility through a single platform gives security teams oversight across AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, SaaS applications, and on-prem networks, so no environment's emergency access is managed in isolation.

Combining these practices with access that's created at runtime keeps break glass accounts accessible, secure, and controlled. Ready to learn more? Schedule time to chat with the team, or see how Britive handles break glass and on-call access.