Symantec Siteminder Reviews

One of the most common use cases for Symantec SiteMinder is deploying it to allow single sign-on sessions between different windows on a web browser, as long as I am connected to the right identity provider. 

I log on to my internal websites using single sign-on, and when I open a webpage to an integrated application, it picks up the credentials from the existing session. I am then automatically authenticated and presented with the landing page.

The feature that I mostly valued is the ease of installation on different systems, especially on Windows. Additionally, it is very beneficial for deploying single sign-on sessions between different windows on a web browser, provided I am connected to the right identity provider. That seamless integration significantly improves user experience and efficiency.

We are using Siteminder as a reverse proxy and hosting these applications from our end to give security to the applications from the third party and the hackers. On the Siteminder side, from our side, what I am doing is just onboarding the applications and restarting the SiteMinder console for some time.

The access control and the SSO are the two most valuable features. Siteminder allows users to authenticate once and gain access to multiple applications without needing to reauthenticate for each application separately. For example, if you access one application in one tab, you do not need to provide it again if you are trying to access the same application. The portal has different applications built into it. It's similar to Google. If you open Google and try to access the maps in that Google, you do not need to authenticate in maps. You just need to authenticate in the starting phase.  

Only a particular group of people have access. Our guys will give an error called access denied or unauthorized access. It depends on the application. 

It is pretty easy to learn.

We use our SSO CA product for doing our single sign-on for our B2B customers. We have about 200 applications that sit behind it and it does all our single sign-on for about 50,000 customers that we have in our B2B space.

We have three single sign-on products in our office and I believe that the CA product offers the best product of the three. We have Oracle Access Manager, and Open SSO also. Single sign-on is very fast. I've always been impressed with that. It's flexible. It give us a lot of opportunities for growth. It's been a very reliable product for us.

I'd like to see the federation piece made a little simpler. Working with Samuel in federation and those components, it can prove pretty challenging and that's where we've had to go outside and seek additional help on those areas. Their interface could use some work but they made great improvements with the 12.5 release. I think those are the primary areas.

The most valuable feature is being able to debug problems, even though it can be a little bit complex and you have to know quite a bit to be able to dig around, root around, and figure out what the problem is. But I think getting into it, once you understand it, it's not too bad.

It definitely makes customers' or users' lives easier. People don't really appreciate it until they don't have it. Once everyone has SSO, if you took it away, they'd say something like, "Oh my God. I've got to put my password in every single time."

Just having it there, even though people may not consciously realize it, is a big benefit for companies. It simplifies things; reduces user/customer frustration.

We use it for identity management, portability control, and single sign-on purposes. We also use it as part of our IT infrastructure to meet various requirements, such as multi-factor authentication and biometric features.

We can easily apply multi-factor authentication to our infrastructure through Siteminder, enabling us to cover web application authentication.

We use the solution for AWS single sign-on because we have not enabled federation for Symantec SiteMinder. We use Symantec SiteMinder for all the legacy on-premises systems.

The solution has features that allow you to easily distinguish between protected and unprotected resources. Symantec SiteMinder can work independently, and we can configure it with one Apache proxy server. You can use any Apache proxy or directly install the agent on the server. With that agent, the application team can access their application.

This is a web single sign-on product.

The solution is very stable.

It's simple to implement, and very easy to customize.

It's quite scalable.

It provides the breadth and the width to provide solutions for the different kinds of technologies which we have. Stability is the most important thing for us. It just allows the user a simple, one way of authenticating. They really made life simple for the user and and the user experience has improved. The user doesn't have to memorize and retain many passwords. They provide a secure and an easy to use solution.

As we are moving in to the mobility space, this is where we really see SiteMinder and their other product really come together to provide a solution base to a different area where the IoT is coming, the different business communications are happening. All of those things require authentication and we really want to see this product grow into that role.