What should organisations do when break-glass accounts still exist?

What break-glass accounts should be used for, and what they should not become

Break-glass accounts are there for exceptional recovery, such as IdP outage, MFA failure, or lockout scenarios, not for everyday privileged work. If they are still present, organisations should treat them as controlled emergency paths with clear ownership, narrow scope, and a defined retirement or replacement plan. The account should exist because recovery still needs it, not because privileged access design has stalled.

A useful way to judge them is whether they solve a specific recovery failure that normal privileged access cannot cover. If the answer is yes, the control objective is to keep the account available without letting it become a parallel admin path. If the answer is no, the account is probably a legacy exception that should be removed.

That distinction matters because break-glass access often survives longer than the operational problem it was meant to cover. Once the business has stronger MFA, better directory resilience, or Privileged Access Management Guide controls such as just-in-time elevation and session oversight, the emergency account should be revalidated against those newer safeguards rather than assumed necessary.

How to assess whether a break-glass account still earns its place

Start with scope and necessity. A valid break-glass account should have the minimum permissions needed to restore service, not broad standing rights that mirror or exceed day-to-day administrator access. It should also have a single, documented recovery purpose so responders know exactly when it may be used and when it should not.

Then test whether the same recovery objective can be met with a safer design. In many environments, just-in-time elevation, stronger role separation, or better credential recovery processes can replace a standing emergency account without reducing resilience. The right question is not whether break-glass access is convenient, but whether it is still the least risky way to preserve recovery capability.

Monitoring is part of that assessment. Emergency accounts should be highly visible in logs, alerting, and review workflows so usage is unmistakable and investigated quickly. Break-Glass and Emergency Access Account Guide covers the control pattern for testing, protecting, and reviewing these accounts in cloud directories, PAM, and critical systems.

What organisations should do when the account remains necessary

If the account still has a justified recovery role, organisations should harden it as an exception, not normalise it as a user path. That means strong protection for the secret or credential, very limited activation conditions, explicit approval or dual-control where practical, and a review cycle that checks whether the account is still justified after platform changes.

The practical aim is to reduce both blast radius and ambiguity. Break-glass credentials should not be reused across environments, embedded in scripts, or made easy to confuse with ordinary administrator accounts. They should also be tested under controlled conditions so the team knows the recovery process works before a real incident forces the issue.

Where privileged access maturity has improved, the account should be marked for reduction, replacement, or removal. That usually means comparing the recovery requirement with normal admin workflows and deciding whether the emergency path is still needed at all, or whether it is now a backup to a control that has already been superseded.

Risk and Threat Considerations

Break-glass accounts are attractive because they are intentionally exempt from normal day-to-day friction, which makes them high-value targets if they are overprivileged, poorly monitored, or left in service for too long. The main risk is not the existence of an emergency path, but the drift from emergency-only use into an always-available privileged backdoor.

Failure mechanism: Excessive privilege, weak monitoring, or stale ownership can turn a recovery account into a standing access path that attackers can abuse after credential theft or insider misuse. If the account is rarely exercised, teams may also fail to notice broken controls or unusable recovery steps until a real incident exposes them.

Impact: A compromised break-glass account can bypass normal privileged access controls, expand blast radius during an incident, and undermine the organisation’s ability to prove that emergency access is exceptional rather than routine. In regulated environments, that can also create audit and accountability problems.

Practitioner Guidance

What to prioritise: Treat every existing break-glass account as a candidate for justification review, scope reduction, or replacement by just-in-time access. The first decision is whether the account still covers a recovery gap that cannot be met safely another way.

What to verify: Confirm who owns the account, what outage or lockout it is meant to resolve, which systems it can reach, and whether usage is alertable and reviewable. If any of those cannot be answered cleanly, the account is already higher risk than its label suggests.

Common mistake: Teams often preserve emergency accounts indefinitely because removing them feels risky. In practice, the greater risk is allowing a temporary exception to become a permanent privilege path with weak governance and unclear necessity.

Practitioner takeaway: Keep break-glass accounts only when they are still needed for recovery, and keep them as tightly bounded exceptions that can be retired once normal privileged access is strong enough to carry the load.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• When should organisations prioritise JIT access over break-glass accounts?
• Why do non-human identities create more audit risk than human accounts?
• How should security teams govern non-human identities alongside human accounts?
• Why do non-human identities create compliance risk even when policies exist?