I'm not sure it's possible to speculate in a way which is generic over all possible infrastructures. You'll also hit the inevitable tradeoff of security (which

I'm not sure it's possible to speculate in a way which is generic over all possible infrastructures. You'll also hit the inevitable tradeoff of security (which tends towards minimal privilege, aka single points of failure) vs reliability (which favours 'escape hatches' such as you mentioned, which tend to be very dangerous from a security standpoint).