TL;DR

• Just-in-time (JIT) access reduces cloud risk by replacing standing privileges with short-lived, on-demand access that expires automatically.

• AWS, Azure, and GCP all support JIT, but each cloud implements time-bound access differently, with distinct approval, enforcement, and audit models. 

• JIT is most effective when approvals, access duration, and logging are tightly scoped and consistently enforced.

• Real-world JIT failures usually stem from fragmented governance, inconsistent policy enforcement, and limited risk context across environments, not from missing features. In other words, it’s critical to prioritize unified governance and risk-aware access decisions.

Today, identity and access risks are a critical failure point in cloud security: ReliaQuest research from November 2025 shows that identity-based security vulnerabilities cause 44% of all confirmed cloud security alerts, while cloud identities maintain excessive access permissions in 99% of cases. 

As these statistics demonstrate, threat actors don’t require zero-day exploits or specialized attack methods to do damage; they can exploit existing credentials that already have excessive permissions to breach systems instead.

That’s where just-in-time (JIT) access comes in. This article provides a functional guide to enabling JIT across AWS, Azure, and GCP to slash identity and access risks.

We’ll focus on foundational mechanisms needed for daily operations (including elevation functionality, time restriction management, approval locations, and usage verification methods), before turning our attention to failure points you should be aware of.

What Is Just-in-Time Access and Why Does It Matter?

Just-in-time access replaces permanent privileges with temporary access that’s granted only when needed and expires automatically.

The security benefit of JIT is straightforward: When attackers obtain credentials through phishing or token theft, the long-standing permissions associated with those credentials remain vulnerable even after their original functions become obsolete. 

In contrast, JIT implements least-privileged access controls through instant permissions, limiting exposure time (e.g., to 1 hour), rather granting access that lasts months or years.

Operationally, JIT also cultivates accountability. Engineers must describe their access requirements because approvals require trackable explanations and events.

How Does Just-in-Time Access Work Across Cloud Providers?

At a high level, all cloud platforms implement JIT using the same building blocks:

• A request for elevated access

• An approval or policy decision

• Time-bound enforcement of permissions

• Audit logging of both the elevation and subsequent activity

Still, each provider expresses these concepts in unique ways, which we’ll look at in detail next.

AWS: Implementing JIT with STS and IAM

The following elements form the core building blocks of AWS just-in-time access and underpin all role-based elevation workflows:

• Primitive: STS temporary credentials

• Time-Bound: Role session duration limits

• Elevation Mechanism: Trust policy plus permissions policy

• Audit Mechanism: CloudTrail

The implementation of JIT systems in AWS requires organizations to establish specific elevation roles, which include admin, operations, and break-glass roles, instead of using existing application roles. 

To get the most out of JIT, keep the scope of trust policies for these elevation roles narrow: Authorize cross-account access only to specific identity providers, AWS IAM Identity Center users, and named principals. 

Short session lengths are another way to maximize the security benefits of JIT in AWS, but they’re not enough. It’s also important to define access restrictions and service control policies (SCPs) to prevent unauthorized system entry.

A word of caution: The hardest part of AWS JIT isn’t creating roles; it’s deciding who can assume them, and when. Because AWS doesn’t offer built-in approvals for role assumption, teams usually have to rely on external tools like ticketing systems or identity governance platforms to manage those decisions.

What’s a Typical AWS JIT Flow?

An engineer authenticates through AWS IAM Identity Center or a federated IdP, requests elevated access through an external approval system, assumes a tightly scoped IAM role via STS for a short session, and performs required actions. CloudTrail records both the AssumeRole event and every API call made during that session.

What Are Common Failure Points?

A few critical issues can undermine AWS JIT implementations. Be on the lookout for these failure points:

• Users’ ability to hide their identities through role chaining and broad trust settings

• Long session durations

• Insufficient logging due to trail misconfiguration or excluded areas

Azure: Implementing JIT with Microsoft Entra ID PIM

Azure takes a more opinionated approach to JIT through Microsoft Entra ID Privileged Identity Management (PIM). Users need to activate their eligible roles, which then become available for a specific duration.

The model looks like this:

• Primitive: Eligible role to active role

• Time-Bound: The activation period includes an automatic deactivation process

• Audit Mechanism: PIM activity logs, Entra ID audit logs, and sign-in logs

To use JIT effectively in Azure, organizations must first determine which roles genuinely require standing access and which can be made eligible instead. For most privileged roles, users should be eligible by default and required to activate access only when needed. 

Activation requirements typically include multi-factor authentication, written justification, ticket or incident references, and, in some cases, explicit approver review. Together, these controls ensure that elevated access is both time-bound and accountable, without introducing unnecessary friction for day-to-day operations.

What’s a Typical Azure JIT Flow?

Users activate access on demand through PIM. Activation enforces MFA, captures justification and ticket context, applies Conditional Access at activation time, and automatically removes the role when the activation window expires. There’s a complete audit trail across PIM activity logs, Entra ID audit logs, and sign-in logs.

What Are Common Failure Points?

• Azure’s main challenges are role sprawl and weak eligibility hygiene. If too many users are eligible for too many roles, JIT loses much of its value. 

• The model also fails when organizations use their approval systems as unregulated rubber stamps. 

• At scale, logs are spread across multiple services and formats, which makes it difficult to normalize events and reliably reconstruct who had access, when, and what actions were taken.

GCP: Implementing JIT with IAM Conditions and Privileged Access Manager

GCP offers two main paths to JIT: IAM Conditions and Privileged Access Manager (PAM). Both authorization methods enable temporary access, but they differ in their complexity and management structures:

• Primitives: IAM Conditions and PAM requests

• Time-Bound: Expiry conditions (IAM Conditions), time-limited grants (PAM)

• Activation Flow:

  • IAM Conditions: Policy-based enforcement with time-bound bindings (no explicit request or approval step) 

  • Privileged Access Manager: Explicit request, approval, and temporary role grant

• Audit Mechanism: Cloud Audit Logs, PAM-specific events

IAM Conditions allows you to attach time-based expressions to role bindings. This method produces excellent results, but it complicates system administration because it struggles to handle situations beyond standard time-based expiration rules.

On the other hand, Privileged Access Manager requires users to request temporary access permissions, which must be approved by authorized personnel. Teams can set up approvers and define both justification requirements and time limits for approval processes. Custom roles are often preferred to avoid overly coarse permissions.

As a rule of thumb, IAM Conditions works best for simple, predictable time-based access (like short-lived projects or maintenance windows), while Privileged Access Manager is the better choice when approvals, justification, and auditability are required. Teams that need human-in-the-loop governance almost always end up standardizing on PAM.

What Are Common Failure Points?

Some failure points apply to both approaches, like audit gaps, while others are specific to how each model works. 

• Failure Points Specific to IAM Conditions:

  • Overly broad predefined roles combined with conditional bindings

  • Complex condition logic that few people understand or can safely maintain

  • Difficulty extending beyond simple time-based constraints without policy sprawl

• Failure Points Specific to Privileged Access Manager (PAM):

  • Service account sprawl tied to temporary grants and automation 

  • Approval workflows that become rubber stamps under operational pressure

  • Inconsistent use of custom roles, leading to overly coarse permissions

How Does JIT Compare Across Clouds?

Here’s an at-a-glance comparison of JIT in AWS, Azure, and GCP:

What Breaks in Real-World JIT Deployments?

In production, JIT rarely fails because of missing features. It fails because of edge cases, organizational shortcuts, and human behavior.

Emergency access is often excluded from normal governance under the assumption that it’s rarely used. In reality, these accounts tend to accumulate broad and permanent privileges and are almost never reviewed. 

Adding to these challenges, the three main cloud providers implement their break-glass systems differently: AWS uses trust policies with IAM roles, Azure uses Entra ID emergency accounts, and GCP uses highly privileged roles and emergency access patterns for fallback access. 

As a result, break-glass access often becomes an invisible entry point. Without continuous monitoring and regular review of usage records, emergency access can be exercised without detection, undermining the intent of JIT controls.

JIT drift is another common challenge. Temporary access is repeatedly extended to avoid operational friction, eligibility lists expand to cover edge cases, and approval requirements are gradually relaxed to keep projects moving. 

Over time, a model designed to enforce short-lived elevations becomes a de facto standing-access system with extra steps. Even though access technically expires, the same administrators consistently re-activate privileges, resulting in continuous elevated access in practice.

Finally, teams also struggle to document intent for JIT usage. When justifications are free-text and approvals are rushed, it becomes difficult to distinguish legitimate operational need from habitual privilege use. In the long run, this erodes trust in the JIT process itself and makes post-incident investigations far more complex.

Why Is Cloud-Native JIT Hard to Operate at Scale?

Operating JIT across clouds exposes a deeper structural problem: Identity governance is fragmented by design. Each cloud exposes different APIs, permission models, condition languages, and logging formats. Even when each environment is well-configured individually, the overall system is hard to reason about.

Unfortunately, governance problems worsen as your system size increases. It’s common to have 100 to 1,000 operational environments, each with different role configurations, exception rules, and environmental conditions. Every system maintains its own approval workflows while storing logs in separate locations, without a unified control system to connect all components.

Without centralized visibility and governance, identity teams spend their time maintaining the mechanics of JIT instead of improving security outcomes. And development teams are consumed by maintaining scripts, reviewing scattered logs, and reconciling approvals across tools instead of proactively reducing risk.

The main takeaway? Just-in-time access needs to operate as a unified system to be a reliable, scalable security control.

How Does Linx Security Change the Equation?

Linx Security helps close the gaps left by cloud-native JIT by extending just-in-time access beyond individual cloud providers to the entire organizational stack: across multiple clouds, SaaS applications, infrastructure, and internal systems. 

Rather than focusing only on isolated elevation events, Linx ties just-in-time and just-enough access to identity lifecycle management, cross-cloud governance workflows, and real-time risk signals across both cloud and non-cloud applications. This ensures that access decisions are consistent, centrally governed, and aligned with enterprise-wide policies.

At a high level, access decisions aren’t made in a vacuum or confined to a single environment. Linx continuously evaluates who (or what) is requesting access, the sensitivity of the target system, historical usage patterns, and the potential blast radius if it’s misused. Temporary access is still time-bound, but it’s also contextual, auditable, and easier to reason about. 

The result is a JIT model that scales across clouds and applications. Identity lifecycle data, governance, posture management, and risk-aware approvals work together as a unified system, reducing standing access and approval fatigue while delivering a consistent governance across the entire environment.

If you’re looking to move beyond fragmented, cloud-specific JIT implementations, get a demo with Linx Security and see the difference unified identity security makes.