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.

I need to check the latest documentation, however, being able to expand or at least communicate with other identity providers to perform handshakes would be great. While I have some integration with a few major providers, support for more would be advantageous.

My experience with Symantec SiteMinder spans about one to two years.

In terms of stability, I only encountered a handful of issues, so I would rate it an eight on a scale from one to ten.

Regarding scalability, for its intended purpose, I would also rate it an eight on a scale of one to ten.

Fortunately, I haven't required much support for this solution, however, when I did contact the support team, they were pretty responsive. I received my answers relatively quickly, and I would rate the support a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of Symantec SiteMinder was a bit tricky. I would rate it a seven on a scale of one to ten, where ten indicates an easy setup.

When considering pricing, I have usually advised on the Microsoft solution, but compared to that, Symantec SiteMinder’s pricing is moderately priced. I would rate it a four on a scale where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

I have some experience with single sign-on solutions such as CA or Symantec Single Sign-On, and also a little with Microsoft Federated Identities and their single sign-on.

Overall, I would rate Symantec SiteMinder a eight out of ten. Additionally, I was a partner with Symantec, which falls under Broadcom.

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.

Siteminder needs to improve its user experience. The technology is outdated, in my experience. It's not easily integrated with other products and it is not scalable. The performance can also be a bit slow sometimes.

It needs more colour readiness. We want to work with more services like Azure and AWS. They need to offer deployment options to accommodate hybrid cloud environments.

Siteminder is slow; technologies like Ping are moving more rapidly.

I've used the solution for a years and ten months - almost two years.

We're about to decommission the solution, and we are migrating away from the solution. We are not scaling it up. We only have three people on it right now. Ping has MFA features and API calls as well.

I've contacted technical support. We once had a major issue from the AD side. At the time, no user was able to access a single application at the Siteminder level. We checked a lot of things, and we tried to fetch the logs. I contacted support, and they came in and began to ask questions, it was then we found that there was an issue with the Active Directory. The LDAP server was down in the back end.

We were happy with them. They do deal with people based on priority. When we need them, we get a clear response. However, sometimes the service can vary. Sometimes it's good, and sometimes it's not as good. 

Neutral

I'm also familiar with Ping. 

With Ping, once you know the about the user, there is no chance of having a hack or any other third party. Third parties wouldn't be able to access those applications. Performance-wise, Ping acts like a reverse proxy, similar to Siteminder. 

My role here is to integrate and deploy the applications in Siteminder as well as to migrate Siteminder applications. I did not handle the initial deployment.

When we integrate applications into Siteminder, we just need simple things called application URLs and root resources. If we need any reverse proxy or virtual host, we just need to deploy that to the first server on our side. I'll deploy that back-end URL and application URL to the server, and then I'll go to the CSI Symantec console. And then I'll create new domain and then authentication schemes, authentication policies, then attach data, then put the integration policies into their consent domain and attach those. We deal with host files as well. 

I don't deal with the pricing of the solution.

I'm an end-user.

For those considering the solution, they should be asking how many applications they plan to be working with and why they need the solution in the first place. It is useful as a single sign on account management tool. It's okay. Ping is also an option. 

It makes more sense, with more modern technologies on the market, to learn the new technologies instead of learning Siteminder. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. The main drawback is it is getting old. And the backup isn't there and neither is high performance or good design. There are small things as well, like needing to know Linux commands for using it.

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.

Siteminder allows us to manage identity and portability control efficiently. We can apply multi-factor authentication to our infrastructure, which helps cover web application authentication. Additionally, the integration with other security systems, such as Splunk and QRadar, enhances our security capabilities.

The maintenance cost has increased significantly, and we are concerned about this. We also need to consider the customization or development required for web authentication when using Active Directory.

We have been using Siteminder for seven years.

We have faced issues with support from the vendor, particularly since Broadcom has decreased their supporting group members, affecting our stability in getting good support.

We have concerns about our support from the vendor, especially since Broadcom's support team has downsized, affecting our ability to get satisfactory support.

Negative

The maintenance fee has increased, raising concerns about the overall cost to customers.

We are considering Active Directory and local solutions in Korea as alternatives.

I'd rate the solution two out of ten.

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.

Symantec SiteMinder is not easy to set up and maintain at an infrastructure level. You have to follow multiple steps to set up your infrastructure, which is dependent on a database and certificate.

I have been using Symantec Siteminder for five years.

Symantec Siteminder is a stable solution.

The technical support team is good.

I would recommend the solution to users based on their budget and requirements. We have features to enable the WAF policy. If you are using cookies and all, it is more secure. It's about the functionality you have enabled in your system. Using Federation is more secure than using an AWS solution. You have to enable that feature which is also enabled in Symantec SiteMinder. You have to check whether you have enabled it or not.

Any product is easy to use if your fundamentals are strong. When we started using this product, we had to customize everything according to the application's requirements. Nowadays, most things are out of the box. From a user or administrative point of view, it's not very hard to learn to use Siteminder for the first time compared to Java and .NET.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven to eight out of ten.

Neutral

I use it for authentication and authorization.

SiteMinder simplified user access for our organization.

It's agent-based. It's convenient to deploy and integrate.

From the developer's point of view, it offers quite an easy-to-use interface.

I like being able to integrate with different systems and it is agent-based. 

Inside the same web server, it automatically has the framework to do the authentication and authorization. So it's quite easy to set up, especially for a lot of applications.

It doesn't have a feature for... or maybe it has, but for modern authentication, like OAuth or OIDC. We haven't utilized that portion; we haven't really looked at it because our priority is LDAP integration.

Modern authentication, like SAML-based or OAuth. But in our case with SiteMinder, we haven't utilized that portion of the feature.

In future releases, I would like to see maybe some more modern authentication, OAuth, OIDC, some of these plus identity mapping… It probably already has some of this, but we would want to ask for more identity mapping. 

Also, development of support and compatibility to configure these, like with container-based deployments like Docker.

It's already existing in my environment. We've been using it for quite some years.

So, I have been using it for at least 20 years. 

The pricing is reasonable. 

Overall, I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

My primary use case of Siteminder was single sign-on. 

Siteminder was deployed on cloud. 

Siteminder helped my business function better by covering multiple use cases to perform single sign-on. Some had a web application, some had a native API-based application, some interacted based on SAML, and some had a single-link browser-based application, so there were different scenarios in which you wanted to perform single sign-on. There were different policies for different types of applications, using a single product. 

A valuable feature of Siteminder is the way it handles bulk traffic. The features it has, in terms of routing the traffic and load balancing, are good. 

An area Siteminder could improve on is that there are a few limitations, in terms of new protocols for OpenID. If I want to have different scopes, the features are limited. They also do not have APIs exposed, which is a major drawback. API is a feature I would like to see included in the next release. 

The last time I used Siteminder was eight months ago. 

Siteminder is stable. I would say it's stable with respect to the features it offers. If you are trying to perform something which is not coming out-of-the-box, then it might give you some trouble, but otherwise, the out-of-the-box features are quite stable. 

There is maintenance required for Siteminder, so you will need team members to work on it. If there is a new liability that is out there, then you need to figure out how it impacts your infrastructure, how you can modify it, whether that modification will impact your use cases, and if there is not a patch given by the vendor in order to fix it, how you can do it yourself, and whether that will impact the functionality. 

Whether it's easy or complex to scale will depend on how scalable your enterprise is. If you have multiple data centers, located in multiple places, then it becomes complex to scale. However, if you have a straightforward flow, then the scalability is good. 

I've worked with multiple businesses, some small and others large, ranging from one hundred users to one million users. I know companies who have been using Siteminder for 15 years and others who migrated from Siteminder two years back. Whether they will increase their usage depends on their leadership. If they have already invested money into this, in order to migrate, they would have to invest further, which requires a lot of people. If they see it as a benefit and they think that, by migrating, they can cover multiple other use cases that aren't being covered, then they migrate.

The technical support is not that great. They're slow because they don't have enough people, and good engineers are not spread over the globe. I know that, for the US time zone, there are a few good engineers, but there aren't too many in the remaining time zones. 

We have customers who have migrated from Siteminder. If you compare Siteminder to the many other products available in the market, the new products are more modern, enhanced, and offer more features. If a company thinks that they want to use those features, they migrate from Siteminder. Any new product that is coming up in the market will always bring something new to add, and it can attract more customers and companies. 

The deployment process and initial setup is kind of complex, especially if you want to do a migration from an older version to a new version. There are a lot of manual steps that you need to perform, and if you are doing a pipeline-based deployment, then there are a few hard codings that you need to do. It requires planning. 

The number of people you will need depends on how complex the environment is. I worked on it for multiple clients, so for some, we were just a team of two or three, but for others, we had a team of ten and it still took a lot of time and effort to perform the migration. 

I implemented this solution through an in-house team. 

Companies using Siteminder saw a return on investment, in terms of improved security. It gives security, in terms of organization, asking people to log in to different applications, and improving the user experience and login. At the end of the day, it does provide a return. 

Siteminder is a little costly. You pay for licensing, and they offer packages, so if you have less users, then you have to buy different products at different prices. If you have more of a user base, then the package is different. They also include other features—for example, if you have a database and you're using Siteminder, then it's good to use a Semantic-specific database, but if you are using less, then you have to purchase the database separately. Whereas if you are going for a bigger license, then it comes within the package. It depends on which plan you are using. 

I rate Siteminder an eight out of ten. Siteminder has good performance on specific use cases, so if your use cases align with those, then it's a good solution to go with. But it's always good to do research and see what alternative options are available and what they have to offer in comparison. 

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.

The performance could be better.

The support could be faster. 

Sometimes when your customer has a legacy application and they want to make a single sign-on, you cannot do it with SiteMinder.

The solution doesn't support client-based Java. 

You do need to be pretty comfortable with the product in order to use it. 

The product needs to invest in enhancements. They are not innovating anything lately. The competition is beginning to pull ahead of them and they are getting left behind. 

The cost of the product is a bit high.

My team has been using the solution for eight or nine years. I've used the solution for 15 years or so. 

The solution is very stable. There are less bugs or glitches. 

We have four or five big clients that use the solution. 

The technical support could be faster. We're not 100% satisfied with their level of service. 

The support, in general, is an issue with Broadcom. With any product that Broadcom owns, the general problem is that they are unable to provide the right support. Luckily, SiteMinder is a very stable product. We rarely have issues.

It's not difficult, however, eventually, you need the right expertise to implement the solution. You need the right consultant who has knowledge of the applications, the knowledge surrounding security, and can handle in-depth logging processes that are taking place. Basically, you need the right people to implement it. It's not easy. I would prefer to have a consultant who has the development knowledge.

The size of the team you need to implement the product depends on the size and the scope of the project. For a simple two or three applications, we needed only one consultant to implement. However, if it is a massive implementation with multiple products, multiple web servers, web applications, et cetera, eventually its scope varies and timelines vary, and you will require a couple of engineers to implement it.

Clients need to pay for a partial license and a subscription license. 

The pricing is a bit high and they could make it more competitive.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to others. If they want to have a secure, stable solution for a single sign-on that supports Java, ASP. Net, and most of the web-based applications, I encourage them to go with this product. However, a company must make sure that they have the right people to implement it properly.

We use this solution for applications and portals for a bank in Colombia.

The solution has saved our company from a lot of problems.

The solution is easy to use for our managers.

We did not have any issues with the stability of this solution. We have approximately 5,000 clients using the solution.

The solution has been scalable.

The technical support could be better.

The licensing is fair for this solution.

I rate Symantec Siteminder an eight out of ten.

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.