What is break-glass access? (and how it works on a small team)
Break-glass access is emergency access to a system that bypasses the normal approval process, used when something is on fire and the usual route is too slow or unavailable. The name comes from breaking the glass on a fire alarm: it’s there for a real emergency, you use it deliberately, and everyone knows it was used. Done right, it lets you handle a crisis without leaving a permanent hole in your access model.
When you’d actually use it
Break-glass is for the moment the normal path fails. Production is down at 3am, the one person who approves access is asleep, and every minute of waiting is a minute of outage. That’s what break-glass is for: a way through when the usual door is locked and the building is burning.
What it isn’t for is everyday convenience. If people reach for break-glass because normal access is annoying, you don’t have an emergency valve, you have a second front door with no lock. Every use should be rare enough that it gets noticed.
How to implement break-glass access safely
The whole trick is making emergency access possible without making it easy to abuse. A few things make the difference.
Keep it on a separate path from normal access, so using it is a distinct, deliberate act rather than a checkbox on the usual flow. Log it loudly, so a break-glass event shows up somewhere people will see it, not buried in a log nobody reads. Time-box it hard, so the access expires fast and can’t quietly become standing access. And where you can, have a second person aware when it happens, so one compromised account can’t break the glass unnoticed.
Break-glass vs just-in-time access
Just-in-time access is the normal, everyday way to get access for a task: request it, get approved, and it expires. Break-glass is the emergency override for when that path is broken or too slow. The difference is when you reach for each.
Put simply, JIT is the routine you use every day, break-glass is the exception you hope to rarely need. A healthy setup has both, and if you’re reaching for the exception often, the routine needs fixing.
Where Korvalis fits
The risky thing about break-glass is what happens during that emergency session, when someone has elevated access and the usual guardrails are off. That’s exactly when a mistake or a stolen credential does the most damage.
Korvalis watches live sessions inside your own cloud account, including the high-stakes ones, and cuts off a destructive action before the command finishes, whether it comes from an engineer, a stolen key, a contractor, or an AI agent. For planned high-risk work it also supports a maintenance window, so you can deliberately pause termination while you do something drastic and have it switch back on automatically. Emergency access still needs a guard on the session, and that’s the layer Korvalis adds.
Frequently asked questions
What is break-glass access? Emergency access that bypasses the normal approval process, used when the usual route is too slow or unavailable during an incident.
When do you use it? When a normal access path is broken or too slow in a genuine emergency, not for everyday convenience.
How is it different from just-in-time access? JIT is the normal everyday way to get access. Break-glass is the emergency override for when that path fails.
If it’s the emergency sessions you worry about, see how Korvalis watches them or join the waitlist.