Symantec Siteminder Reviews

I think the most valuable features are handling user authentication and integration with the other applications within the suite, like Single Sign-On.

Multiple users with multiple applications can be authenticated in a single location.

I really can't answer this right now. We have so many other products that serve our needs. There are other vendors that satisfy some of our requirements, so I'm not exactly sure what CA would be able to provide us with.

For the most part, SSO is very stable. Since deployment, it's been very stable for us. We do very regular metrics on availability and we're in the high, high 90s, 99% I think, so it's a very stable, durable product.

I think there are some drawbacks to the scalability. At a recent conference, we heard that it's going to be a lot easier to scale for larger companies. That's going to be good in the future.

Sometimes technical support is slow to respond, and that’s typical. Normally, the first response is, "send us your logs", so they can review our environment. There are specific people assigned to our account, so they know what our environment is like, but they still want to have the log so they can look at it. Sometimes that slows the process of problem resolution.

This decision was made before my time. I came in when the decision was made to go with CA for identity management. Our company was going through a transition of ownership and all the decisions were made at the time. That was about 7 or 8 years ago.

I came 2 or 3 months after the initial setup, so I wasn't part of that. We had a third-party company help us with our development and deployment, so they pretty much took the ball and ran with it. I don't know how complex it was for them. When they presented it to us at deployment time, we were ready to go.

We were looking for anything that would have satisfied our requirements.

Make sure you know who your support staff is, who your vendor representatives are for your account and really get to know them. Give them the requirements that you need and make sure that they're following through. Build good rapport with them. That way they can help you determine what you need to do and feel free in giving different types of suggestions.

When selecting a vendor, we look for:

• responsiveness
• technical support of the product
• accessibility of the technical support teams
• product knowledge
• ability to train their customers on their product

Obviously, the most valuable feature is the flexibility of the solution, it being able to be integrated with a number of applications and solutions; and also, the configurability of the solution.

Security is a big concern of our client and it is certainly something that helps the client be able to secure the application and provide a better user experience; doing a single sign-on instead of multiple logins, for example.

I've seen a lot of analytics capability being built in for a number of products. Obviously, I want to be able to use analytics on CA SSO as well.

The client that I manage it for has used it for four years already.

It's a stable solution. It's been in place for quite some time already. There aren’t a lot of operational or technical issues that are related to the system, so it's a stable solution.

It has been scalable, to us, at this point in time. It's been able to support quite a number of applications for our client. It's scalable to us.

Technical support has been great. Generally, support is very responsive, timely, and obviously, we have account support folks that we can reach out to, to be able to support us if there's any technical issue.

With the setup, obviously, with a large organization, there are quite a number of things to be done. There is some complexity involved, but generally, I would say that it's been quite successful.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because, obviously, again, security is a main concern of a lot of clients. Generally, the solution is stable, it's one of the leaders in the market, and it was chosen to be implemented.

I think what we will be looking for when selecting a vendor is in terms of support, technical support, when there is an issue. I think that's a key component to us when we implement a product. We want to be able to deal with issues when they arise. Can we support it? That's what we will look for from a vendor.

Generally, it's been a great product for us to use. It's been stable. It's been a good product.

We use Siteminder to protect our portal site subscribers. In our case, this refers to people who have dental insurance.

We're a dental insurance company and we've got millions of subscribers.

We have thousands of dentists. We have millions of subscribers who use our dental insurance. There are a couple hundred thousand providers (dentists) in the network. 

SSO affords us the opportunity to have a federated connection between our members, groups, and companies. 

We have a trusting partnership with everyone involved. This solution helps us in that aspect. In summary, it protects our applications, relating to benefits and eligibility, etc. 

It gives providers (or dentists, in our case) the ability to transpose across the different Delta Dentals without having to authenticate more than once. With Siteminder, We don't have to log into every site with a different user name and password — It's one identity for all sites.

Some of the new protocols, like OAuth 2.0, could be improved.

It would be nice to see a better cloud-based solution that's both easy and accessible for all organizations.

I have been using Siteminder since 2011.

Symantec Siteminder Is both scalable and stable. If you need to add more groups of members, it's just a matter of adding another web agent. It's very scalable.

I work with the technical support guys all of the time. They are excellent. 

Since I've been doing it for years, it's hard for me to say it was complex. You have to set up the realms, domains, ACOs, access control, configure the objects, and set up the databases. Speaking as a technical person, I think it could be a little more simplistic, but on a technical level, it's about even with the other solutions available.

Symantec Siteminder is expensive; they could definitely do better on the price.

If you're thinking about implementing this solution, make sure you have the proper infrastructure. Also, try to negotiate the cost.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Symantec Siteminder a rating of eight. If they fixed some of the issues I mentioned, I would give them a higher rating. There's a lot of players out there that are only doing half of what Siteminder does, but they do it with the more advanced protocols.

Validation of people's logins when they log in to their PCs. Everybody, when you turn on your PC, you go SiteMinder to login. Security.

It has performed very well, it does what we need it to do, it's reliable, and it doesn't impose any overhead on the user or on the platform.

• Ease of use for the user 
• Security, of course
• The ease of setup and installation

We can definitely control our user experience better on the PCs. People don't necessarily have to worry about losing something, like a PC, or a tablet, or a phone, because it's controlled by SiteMinder. We can remote wipe it, we can do all sorts of different things to secure it.

Answering this would require me to know what the current platform does or doesn't do, and I'm afraid I'm not a good enough judge to make that evaluation. I might say something and it's already there, and I just don't know about it.

I will say the user interface for login is kind of plain. They could make it a little prettier. The site is a big, blue screen, with "SiteMinder," and that's pretty much it.

It seems pretty stable so far. It's a mature product, it's been around for a long time.

We're using it on thousands and thousands of devices, thousands and thousands of users. So, it's very scalable.

With Single Sign-On, we don't have to do anything in our system.

After they deploy the application, everything works seamlessly. That's the main benefit that we get out of this product. For authentication purposes, we can keep security out of our applications, which is productive for us.

We can rapidly onboard different partners. We don't have to wait for months to do that. For this, we use the Federation feature from CA Single Sign-On, which helps us a lot.

There is a need to introduce more templates in the UI side and this would help design this aspect better. As of now, there are only a few samples available.

There is scope for improvement in this product.

It works fine. We did not find any stability issues. It is very rare to see something go wrong, so the application is quite stable.

However, we have noticed that when you update to the latest version, it can be unstable. Right now, we are in a stable environment.

You can scale it very easily. It works exactly the way the product has been documented. We can scale it well and we did not find any issues with it.

The technical support level is moderate. I would give it a 5/10 rating.

It depends both ways - we need immediate solutions however from their end, it takes time to get answers.

We required such a product, as we were using an old solution. That’s how we started using CA Single Sign-On with the CA SiteMinder.

The setup was not straightforward. I would give it a 7/10 rating - 1 being simple and 10 being complex. So, it was quite complex.

I would advise others to use this tool as it is robust and mostly it solves all the problems that arise in our industry.

We did consider other vendors. However, after we saw the demo for this product, we decided to purchase this product.

The factors we looked into before purchasing this product are the benefits of this product, how CA functions with other tools, costs, the level of support provided, upgrades and so on.

Our primary purpose for using it is to manage and control access to our web applications. We've extended the use somewhat to protect other environments in our shop where we need to authenticate users.

For example, we have a GemFire caching product, and we want to limit what data users can access within the GemFire environment. So we leverage SiteMinder and its policies within GemFire to authenticate the user and to authorize them based on what type of data they are accessing.

We also use it to federate identity with external clients and vendors. We use the federation component to federate identities between ourselves and outside third-parties.

We're moving to an API-based application development model with SiteMinder in that environment. It's important for us to be able to handle authentication and authorization issues when client-side mobile apps are calling to our services. We needed to handle the responses from those authentication problems better than the traditional SiteMinder SSO system did. 12.52 provides a really nice web-app customer response feature that allows us to customize responses back to the mobile app or the browser assignments.

We're really interested in the containerized version of CA SSO where the product will be delivered as a container image rather than the traditional binary.

We'd also like to see a more streamlined implementation update process.

Also, I think they need to improve their support a little bit better especially with experienced customers who are very knowledgeable in product. It's difficult when working on level higher than support.

We brought it in a little over 10 years ago. We're currently in production on 12.0, but we're right in the middle of our migration to 12.52.

We have a very carefully planned roll-out of these products. We won't go into production as long as we're having stability issues. I would say for 12.0, our experience was fairly elongated to get to the resolution of some issues, probably a couple of months. With 12.52, we've had a couple of issues, but we already have patches and work arounds for them, and so we think that things have improved.

In the past, whenever we migrated to a new version, there's been a little bit of stability issues at the beginning and I would say with 12.0 in particular we had some stability issues. But we believe 12.52 is a lot more stable, but that's yet to be seen.

It's a hit and miss thing, like all support organizations. For the most part, for simple problems they can get to a resolution fairly quickly. If the problem is a little more complicated, they really struggle with getting us a solution. We usually have to escalate the problem to our contact engineer. But then it depends on how important the problem is. If it's like a real critical problem affecting our production environment, we'll push a little harder. We'll call up our CA representative and try to escalate the problem.

I wasn't involved in this initial decision to bring it in, but I was brought onto the team fairly soon thereafter.

I think Oracle and IBM have similar products. For due diligence purposes, We occasionally take a look at other vendors and compare features, but so far we're happy with CA.

I would totally recommend this product, but I think CA has a really good handle on what the drivers are and where the business is going in terms of application development. They seem to be a good fit.

The most valuable features are:

• Ease of deployment, and
• It’s customizable within the user interface.

It helps protect our applications and provides identity management. It allows us to do business with third-party apps, and they’re a recognized industry leader.

For the login experience, it’s seamless navigation from one app to the next. It’s responsive and promotes ease of doing business.

Upgrade planning is extensive and costly and involves a lot of applications, so we’d like to see that improved. Also, the policy export/import could be easier for when we go between environments and when we export/import into our production environment.

There are some security risks that we’re evaluating with a current version of the product that might require an upgrade. From an upgrade standpoint, it’s challenging – not a simple, agile type upgrade. It’s a major upgrade that affects a lot of our applications.

Highly stable. We have it pretty well tuned.

It’s scalable from one app to the next, and we already have the infrastructure built out to support it.

They provide a pretty good service, especially as we’re entertaining additional products and services. We had an upgrade from R6 to R12, which was significant, which we managed through support. Understanding the urgency and sensitivity behind it, we got their account management team to come on-site and help.

It’s stable, the client experience is really good, and there’s an opportunity for us to improve response times. They could improve integration with other products in the suite.

Understand what their business cases are before they pursue a solution; understand where they have a need. Sometimes applications themselves don’t necessarily need to be integrated with something as robust as SiteMinder doing ID management, so I’d recommend looking at the business functions and what their needs are before they pursue the SiteMinder solution.

The features most valuable to us are its usability, the way you can customize it, and its supportability.

From an organizational perspective, it helps us to maintain IDs and it enhances the user experience. With just a single ID, people don't have to really remember multiple user IDs and passwords. So, it's a tool to enhance the user experience.

I'd like to see less issues when we implement new customizations or technologies. Being able to customize is something we'd like to do, but it needs improvement to allow that to happen without issue.

It tends to be buggy, though not to a high level. Where we have seen most of the problems is when we want to incorporate a new feature or when we want to implement some customization or when we want to implement a new technology. During those times, we have seen it to be buggy.

Like the stability, we have had some issues with bringing in new integrations or customizing it for our need. It's been a journey figuring out how to scale it.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

It may be a good product, but I'd advise staying away from customizing it.