Just-in-Time Access Approval for On-Call Engineers
The alert hits your screen. A production service is down. You need access—fast. But your credentials don’t have the permissions. Approval gates stand in the way. Every second counts.
Just-in-time access approval solves this by granting privileged access only when you need it, and only for as long as you need it. For on-call engineer access, this approach eliminates standing privileges that can be exploited, while keeping incident response times low. The request, approval, and enforcement happen in real time, without preloading accounts with risky permanent permissions.
A proper just-in-time system for on-call engineers has three key steps:
- Request — The engineer triggers an access request as soon as the incident is identified.
- Approve — An authorized teammate or automated policy validates the request against context: time, role, current incident severity.
- Expire — Access automatically ends after the approved duration, with logs capturing every command run.
Security teams reduce attack surface. Engineers get the exact access they need to fix issues. Audit trails become complete and indisputable. This model is faster than waiting for manual credential provisioning and safer than leaving admin rights open indefinitely.
To implement just-in-time access approval for on-call engineer access, integrate with your identity provider and production environment controls. Policies should be clear: who can approve, for how long, and in which systems. Automation ensures requests and approvals happen instantly, without switches to email or chat.
When incidents hit at 2 a.m., you want speed without sacrificing control. This method delivers both. And you can deploy it now.
See how just-in-time access approval for on-call engineers works in practice. Go to hoop.dev and get it running in minutes.