Cybersecurity Glossary
Break Glass Account
An emergency administrator login kept aside for the day normal access fails.
What Break Glass Account means
If your identity provider is down, or a policy misconfiguration locks everyone out, you need one route back in. A break glass account is excluded from the usual conditional access rules, has a long random password stored offline and is monitored so that any use raises an alarm immediately.
Why Break Glass Account matters for small businesses and nonprofits
Small teams discover the need for this at the worst possible moment, usually during an incident when the person who could have fixed it cannot log in either. Setting one up takes half an hour and costs nothing.
What to do about Break Glass Account
- Create two emergency accounts, store the credentials offline in separate physical places
- Exclude them from conditional access, but alert on every single sign in
- Test them on a date in the calendar, at least once a year
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An emergency administrator login kept aside for the day normal access fails.