Privileged Access Management (PAM) is the security discipline concerned with controlling, auditing, and minimising the use of privileged accounts: root access, domain administrator rights, cloud IAM roles with wide permissions, database superuser credentials, service account tokens, and any other identity that can cause systemic damage if misused. The threat PAM addresses is specific: an attacker who obtains a regular user credential can typically access that user’s data; an attacker who obtains a privileged credential can move laterally, disable security controls, exfiltrate everything, and deploy ransomware. PAM is therefore not a generalisation of identity and access management (IAM) but a specialisation of it — the same concepts of authentication and authorisation, applied with far higher friction to the accounts that most need it.
A break-glass user (or break-glass account, emergency access account) is a privileged account that exists outside the normal access control workflow — bypassing PAM approval gates, MFA requirements, or SSO dependencies — and is reserved for situations where those normal mechanisms are themselves unavailable or would prevent responding to a critical incident in time. The name is a physical analogy: like the fire alarm panel behind a pane of glass that reads break glass in emergency, the account is designed so that accessing it requires a deliberate, detectable act. It is not a convenience mechanism; it is an organisational safety net for scenarios such as an identity provider outage locking all administrators out of their own infrastructure, a PAM platform failing during an active incident, or a ransomware attack disabling the tooling needed to contain it.
A bastion host (also called a jump server or jump host) is a hardened server placed at the boundary between a public network and a protected private network, through which all administrative access to internal systems must pass. Rather than exposing every server, database, or network device directly to the internet or to operator workstations, the network is designed so that only the bastion host has a publicly reachable address; internal systems accept SSH or RDP connections only from the bastion’s IP. An administrator who needs to reach an internal host connects first to the bastion — authenticating with a key, certificate, or MFA — and then hops onward to the target from there. The bastion’s narrow exposure makes it a concentrated target, which is why it receives disproportionate hardening: a minimal OS with only the necessary services running, strict firewall rules, aggressive patch cadence, and comprehensive session logging. The name comes from military fortification: a bastion is a protruding element of a castle wall designed to be defended at all costs.
