Symantec Siteminder Reviews

We primarily want to use the solution to implement our SSO, Single Sign-On solution.

The single sign-on is the solution's most valuable feature.

Since we're in the early stages of examining the solution, it's hard to predict what might be lacking.

We're currently unable to find information about if the solution can do a full implementation with SQL. Some better and more accessible documentation for new users or those curious about the product would be helpful.

We want to implement a simple application. Currently, from what we're finding, we're not sure if it would work the way we need it to.

The solution is quite new to us and I only really started looking at it about two or three weeks ago. We're in the testing phase.

We've never contacted technical support.

For a long time, we used SiteMinder, We're currently looking into what might be a better solution for SSO. That's why we're currently evaluating CA SSO. We'd been using the previous solution for two or three years but it hasn't been able to provide us with what we needed. Currently, we're trying to implement CA on servers for IPMP.

The initial setup seems straightforward, but we're curious about the aspect of SSO for SQL servers. We're also investigating from the net side to see what requirements are needed. We haven't implemented or deployed it yet.

We have our own in-house team that will handle the implementation.

I'm an implementor, so I help clients implement the solution for their companies.

We're still in the process of testing the solution. We're currently not providing services on it as we are still in the testing phase.

So far, with a simple implementation of the SSO, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is a single sign-on to gain access to users and servers.

The security from the logistics team has required us to have a single sign-on solution. We implemented several single sign-on servers and we integrated them into one. The users would use it as a jump server. They would connect to it and from there, they would access the main server.

The most valuable feature is the integration with the Active Directory.

To add more value to this solution it needs to be more user-friendly. This is what is really needed in the next release of this product.

I have been using this solution for two years. My experience with this solution is as an end-user.

The stability is fine, we have not had any issues.

This solution is scalable.

We have more than 100 users who are made up of engineers and administrators.

I have not been in touch with technical support.

Previously, I used Arcon as a bridge to build access management. Arcon is different from CA SSO single sign-on.

I changed jobs and in this new location, Arcon was deployed.

The initial setup was not a problem. I would rate the difficulty a seven out of ten.

We have a large network with several servers and it took more than six months for the initial implementation.

We had a team of three engineers to deploy this solution on-premises. They were responsible for the administration of the single sign-on.

We implemented this solution with the help of one of the partners.

My advice to anybody considering this solution is to always create their use cases so that they can do a complete and thorough POC before purchasing this solution.

Do not force the implementation of these types of solutions. It was forced by the management without proper planning. I have learned that proper planning works best for these types of solutions because you have to integrate with different components of the network, in order to be successful.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Customer was looking for initially an automated self user registration through a secure channel. Apparently it looks like a very easy going requirements but if you look in the detail they want to authenticate before registration process. A user came to create an Identity and customer wants to authenticate and securly takes the same data. 

Another issue was localization and reporting 

If I describe what actually happened, a little bit of the business case, that will help you to understand what it was like. The customer is the kind of customer that really doesn't want to share anything. When a person joins that organization, he has to pass through a couple of security levels, the scrutiny, before the ID is given to him. They used to use a manual process. Whenever a person joined the organization, they used to take his details; they used to write on a piece of paper; then this paper used to go to one of the departments; then it goes to another department; and so on. It wasn’t just a matter of going from one building to another; it was going from region to region.

Finally, this paper goes through a couple of scrutiny procedures. Then, it used to come back to the IT department, and finally, they do their security check and they create the ID and give it to them in an envelope. That was a kind of long procedure that sometimes took 2-4 months to create the ID; just an ID for a person. It was a challenge for the customer for the last 20 years.

We were doing that project and during that project, we found that the project owner wasn’t trusted. The project sponsor wasn’t trusted to just change this overall but they had this security constraint. What they actually wanted was that when they create the ID, they want this person to be authenticated. Generally, this is not the case in any organization, that somebody joins an office and he doesn't have any ID. So, how are you going to authenticate it?

What happened was that what we've been told, “Will you guys do this? Authenticate through a national database? We want, when a person is going to join us and he will request an ID, he should be authenticated through a biometric and that fingerprint will take him to the national database, where he will check in and it will come back to their IDP, their identity provider. They have it internally, and then, we will pass it through our system.”

Now, this was a challenge because in CA Identity Management, when you have a self-user registration page, this page was open so anybody could go and open it. We needed to protect that page, and on top of that, this information had to be protected to a third party. What we did is, we brought a couple of products in the middle of it: CA Federation, CA Single Sign-On, and CA Identity Management.

What happened when the user got authenticated with his fingerprint, it comes to the IDP, we have federation through CA Federation and then, once it passes through it, we have CA SSO, which is protecting the identity management page. Once it gets past this information, it comes to the self-user registration page, but here's another challenge: You've been authenticated but now you have a page which is open. I can authenticate myself and put someone else through the system. That could be a possibility, so we had a problem.

What we did is, we just pulled the data out from the third-party, national database and brought them to the CA identity page, to the self-user registration page, and all his names, IDs, and phone numbers, come in automatically. Then, it goes through several approval processes. Finally, the ID is transmitted over his mobile number that is in the national database.

That kind of work we have done. There are other challenges, as well.

The most valuable feature is that it meets the requirements of the customer. You have a lot of features in the product. Every product has them, but the question is, are these products going to meet the requirement of the customer? Because, if you meet the requirements of the customer, then it's way too easy to get inside the customer. We met the requirements of the customer and that's why I believe that this product has value.

I think the future release is, if you ask me, I think they have done a lot in the new release, especially the front end. The front end was not as good. CA did a good job in doing it, especially when I look at the new identity suite. They have done a good job in changing the overall look and feel. This is actually what the customer was looking for. The look and feel was not good in the earlier product. It's a journey, so we just completed one of the requirements for the customer.

CA has reporting at the moment. With the reporting, every particular segmented product has a reporting engine. I would like to see centralized reporting for all of them together. If an enterprise customer has all of these three or four modules for security, he will get consolidated reporting.

A problem we had with the customer was, at the moment, we were asked, “Are you able to integrate these products together?” Were we able to get the requirement done for the customer, as a business requirement? The reporting side we were unable to do it out-of-the-box. If CA consolidates the reporting for all three together, it may be easier. I'm not sure, but it may be easier.

No at all.

We are changing the architecture to scale it.

Customer Service:

An eight out of 10.

Technical Support:

A seven out of 10

No.

It's one of most complex requirements as explained earlier.

CA Partner implemented it

Time value and money.

CA solutions.. Are generally expensive but for the customer the ROI is big.

Yes

When you are looking for a security solution, products are there in the market, but you really don't want to go for a product that looks very beautiful from the front but has very bad stuff in the back end. One good thing is that CA has, I believe, that is has an edge. It allows me do a lot of what the customer is looking for, beyond the customer; beyond the product boundaries. They are certain things that we would not be able to do if this CA solution didn’t have this flexibility, and it's highly secure. It is a highly reliable solution to work with.

We implemented the solution almost a year and a half ago and up until now, there has been no downtime. It is reliable; it is good; it is open for customization; it is open for integration.

From my experience working with CA for almost 13 years, it’s a company. I'm not saying it’s specific to a solution. I'm talking about CA in general. It's a company with a solution and the company with the right solutions.

I have explained the journey of how these solutions (not specifically CA SSO only, but their entire security suite, including Federated Identity Management) met the requirements:

• The customer was looking to have a self registration and password reset portal for their organization but they don't want to leave this portal open and accessible to everyone without been authenticated. This was only challenge, which I have mentioned it.
• Second solution, open for customization for security from different datasources.
• Thirdly, localization of this solution. Eventually, if these solutions have only listed features and it works only what they present. For sure, we wouldn't be able to achieve it.

There are critics and these critics help CA to build their good solutions.

Extraordinary product; extraordinary flexibility to explore and meet the requirements of the customer.

Our primary use is for client demo on authentication/authorization, federation, and ease of use.

The product was just for client demo purposes. There was no deployment onsite.

• This is the only access management product that I have come across which configures end-to-end and hosts resources. 
• This product is very easy to deploy. I just strictly needed to follow the user-guide.
• The CA directory services is something that I found to be cool. 
• I liked the debugging part. There are only two files (trace file and log file) that you need to look into while performing debugging, and the logs give you the exact info on where and what needs to be fixed. 
• You can quickly deploy the entire product with a basic config within couple of hours.

• The GUIs are not very clear, especially when integrating with other products from CA. 
• Like CA IDM, there can be challenges. One needs to know that they have great hands-on on their app servers to understand the logic and deploy it accordingly.
• There were challenges with version compatibility, and this is something that I did not like. This all happened during the second phase while trying out various integrations.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

Technical support by CA Technologies is wonderful. I used to post my queries and get quick responses. The CA forum is something I would recommend to follow if you are dealing with any CA product. I appreciate their timely and effective responses.

Although it is straightforward, for someone new to access management, it is always a challenge to understand what is done and why. That is where I struggled initially, since I was very new to the domain. Domain knowledge is more important when you are new to a product.

I recommend conducting a PoC on every available product before choose one.

Not applicable.

Be sure to get your doubts clear on any product features, integration with other CA products, and other security products.

I recently came across Okta, which also has cool features.

Before implementing, ask a CA manager to provide you a list of use cases, which can help you in building/offering what you have in mind.

The client has a biometric identification module. We integrated that with the CA Single Sign On for new user registration, and it works perfectly fine for us.

It has considerably reduced the amount of time that new users would take to join into the organization. Previously, it was a lengthy, manual process because it's a very secure environment, where they need to verify the user before they can actually grant him a user-ID and password.

Integrating with the built-in custom application, and exposing CA Single Sign On to the internet, we were able to get the employees onboard. The time that we gained was: previously it would generally take from four to eight weeks for each employee, we brought it to one to two days.

The Federation part of Single Sign On, which is customizable and is easily integrated with any customer application or any third party application.

Maybe they could improve on the Federation part, and Federation with the apps. Not only for the websites, but with the apps also.

It's a very stable product.

Once we experienced a crash, the main policy engine of Single Sign On crashed, but CA gave us a fix for that.

Scalability-wise it's good. It's built into the product.

The support could improve in its response times, and in the understanding of the customers' problems.

It was complex. The Federation part of CA Single Sign On, it's a bit complex to implement because it involves the SSL certificates, exchange of certificates, and lot of technical details. The documentation misses some important parts of this, so that's the reason it took some time for us to go live.

When we're looking to select a vendor for a product, what's most important for a client like ours is the security; the product should be really secure. The next most important is the stability.

I rate it an eight out of 10 because, once we implemented it and the Federation part was working fine, we haven't faced any problems, except for that one instance where the policy was crashing.

I would definitely suggest going for CA Single Sign On.

It is our authentication system for access to online and mobile banking.

Its performance has been good. It works well for us.

It keeps our members safe, that's a benefit for us. It's important.

Federation, for sure, because we have a lot of third-party vendors that we need to integrate with, and this is a turnkey solution in some ways.

The Directory is secure. It's our user store, and it's important to keep our members safe. The product does well with that.

I think they need to integrate some of the newer types of authentication into the product. I'm not seeing the innovation when it comes to biometrics in the product.

Also, easier integration with third-party partners to OpenID Connect because username/passwords are a thing of the past. People are going to be using facial recognition. Apple has gone that way. There are other companies like Daon that are doing this. CA SSO will be left behind if they don't have it yet. There's some innovation being done, but it's not there.

Improvement is being made all the time. I just came out of a session here at the CA World conference where they showed how you set up Federation partners is being improved, through more APIs. Making life easier for the engineer is always important because we are lazy in general. So improvements are being made in that space. There's more to be done, like how to make configurations easier, and not have the engineer having to guess what will happen when he changes a particular setting.

If I had answered this question four years back I would have said "poor." But over the last four years they've done a lot of work to make it stable and it's reasonably stable right now.

It still goes down once in a while. But that's not the product's problem, it's probably how it's configured in our environment. So the product is pretty stable.

It is scalable. It depends on where it's running, and on where it's deployed, and how it's configured. In our case, it is scalable. 

Some parts are scalable, not all parts. We do have some customized pieces within the product itself that we paid CA to build for us. Some of those things are not scalable.

Technical support is good. We're a large scale customer for CA, so we do have Premium Support from them. We had a problem about three years back with the stability and we were going down all the time. We actually got somebody in-house from CA, to come to our office within a few hours, and the person stayed on until the problem was fixed.

We had no choice. We were growing too big. We had a homegrown solution in place six years back, and our CTO at that point made a conscious decision to go towards this approach. And it worked.

I think CA had a pre-existing relationship with our company. And our CTO had used a CA SSO product before, and the recommendation was made at that point. So I don't know whether it was a full evaluation that was done, or whether it was the fact that, "Hey, it is a product that had worked before in other places, and we're talking about a straightforward use case here. So let's just go for it."

In terms of advice to someone looking for a similar solution, this one has worked for us, so think of whether it fits into your space. It may be best-in-class for doing a particular type of function, but that doesn't mean it fits in your ecosystem. So think of that first before you pick something which is best-in-class.

Complex, painful. But that is to be expected of any new setup. When you're a big bank like us, any kind of migration to a new product is hard. I expect it to be painful, and it was painful. But it's not something that you can avoid.

One thing that recently surprised me about CA is how big it is. The product I'm talking about in that context is not a CA product, it's an acquisition that CA made a few years back. I was used to working with the other company. Once we knew that CA bought it, I was surprised to see how big CA is. Just the product suite itself is pretty large. So just that was surprising.

As for the most important criteria when selecting a vendor, technical support is clearly one of them. Vendors tend to sell us something and then walk away, and we're left holding the bag. So tech support is clearly important. Apart from that, in terms of products, we don't care much about best-in-class. We just need to make sure it fits within any kind of technology ecosystem that you have. You could come and sell me a product that is best-in-class for doing a particular thing. But if it doesn't fit into my current stack, than it's useless.

Primary use case is for authentication in Single Sign-On, that's the biggest that we have. But we use it for our internal employees.

It has performed well. We had some hiccups, but that's all.

We had some challenges through modernizing everything over the last two years. Now we are pretty good. We don't see any production challenges. I don't think we have had an incident for a year now.

I think Single Sign-On helps a lot. If you look at our organization, and really all financial institutions, we have a lot of legacy apps. So it really helps to get Single Sign-On.

We use it on the agent model, and we have a lot of capabilities which we leverage to do it on the different apps, so critical apps are protected better. And we do step up using this, but we are looking at other products now to do the advanced track.

We use it mostly out of the box, standard, no customization.

Ease of use is very good, for administrating it. It's very well known. The ease of use is good for our deployment and our applications.

I would like to see a move towards the newer technologies, which is what we are doing right now. I think that's in the roadmap that's coming, in the 12.8 and 14 releases, but we would like to have it sooner than later.

I think now, for over a year, we have had any issues. It has been really very stable for us.

We don't have, and have never had, any scalability challenges.

We use it for challenges we have. If there are any issues that apps are reporting, we use tech support.

I think we have been good for over a year. We always get to the same contact that we have in the support. It's not dedicated support that we have bought, but most of the time it goes to the same person. So it's very easy to traverse.

We had a predecessor to it which was near end of life. I knew this product because I was part of CA previously.

We went with CA because it met most of our requirements. We had a requirement list of what we definitely wanted, what was nice to have, and I could see most of what we wanted.

We actually used CA Professional Services. There were some challenges on some aspects of it, but on the base product, not at all.

We looked at a lot of vendors around it. We had looked at RSA, Ping, and a multitude of others, just on paper, so to speak.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We definitely look at our engagement. We look at the support. That's always the critical factor. Otherwise, I would say most of the products, if you go by the 80/20 principle, they will technically fare well.

I would say invest a lot of time in designing it. Don't just run in without reading the guides and start deploying.

Primary case is to authenticate users and use banking online. It is performing well.

It has definitely made things easier. We do not have to do that development. It is an out-of-the-box product which does the thing it does best.

It has the ability to authenticate and authorize users. It is the main feature for our security.

Better monitoring. A better way to debug a problem. When there is a problem with it, it should log enough information for CA to know what is the problem, like a better debugging tool. 

It needs better debugging and support.

We have had some issues with it, but in general, it is good.

CA was there to help. There is some issues in general.

It is very scalable. We have a very large customer base: 75 million customers. We have about 40 million log in a day. So, the scalability is very good.

We are not very happy with the support, I am sorry to say.

The reason is mostly because we stayed on an older version and we are behind catching up on a newer version. It has become harder for CA to give us good support. 

The main thing is we do not have the traceability and good monitoring that CA can provide us to capture problems when they occur. That is the biggest thing.

It has been an issue. All the problems that we reported actually have never been resolved. We could not capture enough information for CA to be able to debug the problem. This problem does not happen often. But, when it happens, we do not know why, because we are not able to capture the data. I think that is the biggest drawback. The support and its combination between ability for them to support us on all the older versions and different infrastructure to what CA recommends us to do. We are trying to upgrade and all that. Maybe these things will help.

Technical support is always available and very responsive. I have a direct line to the engineers. They allow me to talk to them directly. They really are trying to help the best they can. It does not work out well. In terms of interaction, no problems there.

When I started two years, it was already setup. Now, I am reengineering it. I am doing a different setup to eliminate any customization for CA to support us better. The process is straightforward.

I would recommend this solution. I would recommend the newer version without any customization. That is where we have had a problem because we did our own customization of this product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is the supportability right. J.P. Morgan costs more, but we want stability, resiliency, and we want the product to work. However, it has to be scalable and supportable. That is the main thing for any product which we pick.

We use single sign-on to provide a single login page for all of our client apps across the organization and it performs wonderfully. We almost never have outages nor see slowdowns, not from our stuff anyway. 

People do not have to remember 35 to 40 usernames and passwords. They have a link to go to their page that they need to work on, and it is there. It knows it is them. If we lose an employee, they no longer can sign in from anywhere in the world, they are immediately gone. 

Simplifying the user experience. We use a lot of integrated Windows authentication with it. All of our applications get a point, click, and you are in, while we increase security at the same time.

I would prefer to see their SAML integration be a more streamlined and easier interface, more like PingFederate's interface. Their product works just as well for that use case, but we do not use it, because it is a much larger learning curve to get it running.

It is one of the most stable products in the banking organization that I am in. It never goes down and if it does, it is usually because my partner or me did something to it. 

I have been using it for a year. The company has been using it for probably 20 years. It has always been a very stable product.

It is immensely scalable. We have 18,000 employees running on six servers right now. They are not even at 10% usage, but to spin up more just to add a server and plug it in, it is ready to go.

Technical support is fantastic. They provide quick answers. It is very rare that it takes more than two or three days to actually resolve a non-production problem. With a production problem, they are right there with you the whole time until it is fixed.

We have had large-scale issues, but it never really took them a long time to fix. Usually within a few hours, we would have a fix.

They also take use of their community.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I am involved in building a parallel platform right now for an upgrade. 

The upgrade is a very straightforward setup, easy to install and run. A little bit complex to set up rules, but that is why you want engineers around.

We have a resource that we are paying for from CA, but we really do not need to use them, except for on the Identity Management side. 

I would absolutely recommend they go with SiteMinder SSO. I have worked a little bit with some of the other products out there and they are not as easy to use, and they are definitely not as stable. Shibboleth is a competing free product. It is horrible. A lot of companies use it, but it is not fun.

Because I am new to this area, the thing that surprised me about CA is how quick they are to respond to changing needs. If we tell them we need something or do not know how to do something, they make it happen for us. It seems crazy for such a large organization to make that kind of move. 

The tool is easy to integrate with old, archaic, existing infrastructures that may not have been built with security in mind in the first place. With very little modification, we can usually secure a platform that never really had it before.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: responsiveness. When everything is good, the vendors are always around. It is how they respond when you have a problem.

What we're doing with Single Sign-On, we're providing security to different applications, like protecting the URLs. The other thing is, we're using SAML. With SAML we are connecting to the external vendor, external partner, and providing the customer a single sign-on to at the second domain.

It's more efficient. We're providing immense security to the applications, to Chase. We're securing 70 million customers in Chase.

I find that SAML is the best thing we're using right now because there is no need for creating the external account. If you take a partner like Disney World, if a Chase customer wants to log in to Disney World, then it is easy for them to log in with the same credentials, whatever we have at Chase. There is no need to make a new account or enter in the same data.

So, the Chase user, if he wants to purchase something on Disney World, tickets for example, he doesn't need to give his details to Disney World. He can use the information with the details, whatever we have, in the Chase DB. We're just, as part of the transaction, sending the details to Disney World and he completes the transaction with the details. So in that case, we're providing security to the user data.

We're working on a mobile API gateway. I am really interested to learn more about that.

It's stable, but we are finding some compatibility issues. We're still working with CA people. We're trying to improve the enhancements.

Scalability is good so far. It is user friendly, so we are not experiencing many complications when using this application.

Good support. We work with CA technicians frequently, engineers very frequently. They're very helpful.

Whenever we go to them with an issue, they'll first look at the existing DB. If the same kind of issue happened previously, they'll try to pull that information and provide us the feedback right away. If it is a new issue, they will really work hard to get the issue done, as soon as possible.