[AG.SAD.5] Implement break-glass procedures

Category: FOUNDATIONAL

Emergencies or unforeseen circumstances might necessitate temporary access beyond regular permissions for day-to-day work. Having break-glass procedures helps ensure that your organization can respond effectively to crises without compromising long-term security. During emergency scenarios, like the failure of the organization's identity provider, security incidents, or unavailability of key personnel, these measures provide temporary, elevated access beyond regular permissions.

Implement measures that improve the resilience of your DevOps environments through the ability to respond effectively to emergencies without compromising long-term security. Create break-glass roles and users you can assume control of during emergencies that are able to bypass established controls, update guardrails, troubleshoot issues with automation tooling, or remediate security and operational issues that may occur. These break-glass roles and users should have adequate security measures, such as configuring them with hardware-based multi-factor authentication (MFA), to ensure that even in emergencies, access is tightly controlled and auditable. Establish alerts and alarms triggered by the use of these break-glass roles and users, and tie their usage closely to incident response and recovery procedures.

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