What technologies or processes are recommended for providing escalated access to production servers for SAs for limited time. I'd like to avoid my SA's from having root access. (Enterprise Environment)
Assuming you're running Linux with terminal access only, why not let those user use
Sudo lets users that aren't root to run programs with the security privileges of another user (normally the superuser, or root).
To let a user use
When the user session ends, sudo information is discarded and access is restricted until sudo is and authenticated and executed again.
If you're running a graphic interface on the production server, you can run