Symantec Siteminder Reviews

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.