Symantec Siteminder Valuable Features

Umair (Abu Mohaymin) Akhlaque - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Solutions & Services Head at Duroob Technologies

The solution is very stable.

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

It's quite scalable.

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it_user558618 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Specialist IT Architect at Pramerica

The most valuable feature is the flexibility of this product to integrate with any third-party components and platforms. Support for those is a really interesting feature.

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it_user558552 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Architect And Managing Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

SSO provides out-of-the-box authentication for the majority of the apps; and it provides a holistic solution for the company. Right now, we are using an on-premise solution. If we want to move to the Cloud, CA has that solution as well. So we’re positioned quite well to move into the Cloud as well.

They take the authentication and the core screen authorization out of application code. They also integrate with other security products very well.

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Buyer's Guide
Symantec Siteminder
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Symantec Siteminder. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user558654 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

It is a flexible platform.

Using this product makes it easier for enterprises to integrate a majority or even all their apps into one single solution for access. Its easy-to-use functionality is the most valuable part.

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it_user558561 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Engineer at Qualcomm

The valuable features are security in general and ease of use. More specifically, ease of use for the developers, and security where the developer doesn't have to know about authentication or security. You just put the agent on, and it's all handled for them.

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it_user349344 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Security to protect digital assets is most valuable to us. For the financial industry, security is a high priority. SSO provides solid security, specifically authentication and protecting digital apps and applications. We can define what we protect.

Federation is valuable as well, using the same security across multiple channels like mobile, e-side and m-side, and web services for partners. We can cover all channels with one security solution.

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HD
Sr IAM/PAM Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

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. 

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it_user778740 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at navyfederal
  • Authentication
  • Authorization 
  • The user repository

Without, with the number of customers using our site, if that portion was down, our contact center wouldn't be able to handle the calls, if the authentication and authorization wasn't working.

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it_user372576 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer Principle at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user349326 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Staff IT Engineer, Identity and Access Management at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We like the ease of implementation, integration, and the support matrix. Cookie provider helps us set host-based cookies and provides SSO across multiple domains. It provides restricted cookies as well.

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SH
Software Engineering Consultant at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

As our identity model continues to mature, probably the Federation is most valueable. 

In IT, you're seeing a large shift to the cloud, and to using software as a service applications and, because of that, you still need to be able to securely assert identity. The Federation components of CA Single Sign On allow us to do that effectively and with minimal resource investment, to realize functionality.

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it_user382632 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Systems Engineer with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable feature for us is the user experience in being able to use one set of credentials to access multiple applications. Also, I've never seen anything that does what SSO does. The first time I ever saw SiteMinder/SSO was in the early days of Netegrity, which was version 3.0.

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it_user275949 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Information Security and Cyber Defense at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable features are security and ease-of-use.

Tokenization of the web applications is easy for application owners to integrate with the tool. On the back end the dev side, and the deployment cycle with web agents and policy creation are easy.

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it_user558078 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Security Consultant at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

There are a few valuable features in this product, such as single sign-on and web access management.

Centralized control to enforce security for the entire enterprise and complete visibility of the policies which we implement for most of the web applications make it more valuable for any enterprise. The ease of implementation is standardized and the availability of documentation on the CA Portal is very informative for any engineer to go ahead and implement it on his own.

From time to time, there are various upgrades available on the CA Portal that make it more compatible for all the different web servers or app servers to get it implemented.

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it_user346686 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Security Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The three security products perform different functions, but they are all part of the suite. SiteMinder is an industry leading solution as everyone is using it. The new offerings are simplified, which is good.

Besides that, other things are pretty much on par for the industry products out there. All the products have valuable features, but they’re similar with what’s out there.

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it_user353934 - PeerSpot reviewer
Identity and Access Management Specialist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Single Sign-On is the number one feature of SiteMinder that we're using. The ability to log in once and use those credentials for multiple web sites is very valuable for us.

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it_user778935 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Architect at Raymond James Financial, Inc.

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.

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it_user778626 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Analyst at NRG Energy
  • Authentication
  • Authorization

for our websites. These features are important because all the sites need authentication for security purposes. That has been handled pretty well all these years with SSO.

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it_user558558 - PeerSpot reviewer
SiteMinder Architect at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Security is the most valuable feature.

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it_user558498 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Director of Application Administration with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature is that it takes a lot of the logic for authentication and authorization out of the hands of your application and moves it into a centralized framework. Once we have our authentication and authorization policies set, they are easy to duplicate across all our applications instead of trying to develop them into each application individually. That’s where we probably see the most benefit or the most cost savings for our organization.

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it_user349428 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use it a lot for federation, authenticating in-house or on premises, and that gives us access to an outside SaaS provider.

Also, we like the reverse proxy tool so much that in some instances we’re using SSO just for that and not even single sign-on.

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NJ
Assistant General Manager at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

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

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it_user778593 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user392583 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user359505 - PeerSpot reviewer
Executive Director, CTO Security - Identity Management Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We are talking about the authentication products in general. What was previously SiteMinder, AuthMinder, some of the risk based authentication products that they have. I think the mainstream use that we have for the products are probably around web single sign-on. Being able to sign on to applications, the users not having to authenticate again. One of the good features we get out of the product as well is to be able to include different authentication methods. We use username and password but we also use smart card authentication, which is very key to our company.

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it_user372639 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director IT with 1,001-5,000 employees

CA Single Sign-on is actually our main access control solution which we use to protect our websites, portals and applications, which are exposed internally as well as on the cloud and externally, as well as commercial applications.

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it_user778665 - PeerSpot reviewer
Design Engineer 5 at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Right now, federation that comes out-of-the-box with single sign-on is the most valuable feature that we have, and also scalability.

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it_user383802 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Engineer at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable feature is that it allows a user the ability use the same credentials for different secured parts of a website. From a user-experience perspective, that's important because you don't want to have to remember or write down several sets of credentials. When a user comes into our website, they just want to go about their business, not spend half and hour trying to figure out how to log in.

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it_user345507 - PeerSpot reviewer
Program Manager at LS3 Technologies, Inc.

The ability to easily manage user accounts is great.

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it_user344034 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Security at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable features for us are:

  • Access management
  • Role-based authorization
  • Identity provisioning
  • Identity federation
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it_user778860 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user572877 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consulting Systems Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user558435 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable feature is that it's a rock-solid enterprise solution. It's the de facto standard. It works. It does what we need it to do in those circumstances, and it does it at scale.

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it_user558408 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Architect at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's flexible, powerful, and superperforming, I'd say. It performs very well on the road.

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it_user558636 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Project Management at a local government with 1,001-5,000 employees

The biggest value for us is being able to use SSO as a service that we can expose to all of our customers. For all of our customers, the idea is to have a single sign on where one account is created to access all of our systems.

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it_user350634 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

For us, it’s the best-of-breed pick on the market today. More importantly it’s the least complex enterprise solution that we can manage. It integrates well with multiple applications in multiple environments. That’s a big deal for us.

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it_user349443 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Security Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Single sign-on allows you to log into multiple areas and sessions with just one user login. SiteMinder uses a cookie to pass the credentials along to different applications, and it’s encrypted. You can determine how long the session will last before users have to log in again. And if you have NTFS capability, it just automatically logs in again for them, using a firewall to protect LDAP.

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it_user348420 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Engineer II at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

It provides us with authentications, authorizations, and basically providing the client with better secure services.

We can differentiate between the good logins with a genuine user and unauthorized ones.

It’s easy, versatile, and functionality-wise, it’s very user-friendly as well.

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it_user558639 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Member Technical Staff at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable feature is that it enables us to integrate multiple applications and give our users a true single sign-on experience when they go from one app to another app. From the user experience point of view, it definitely adds value to the company.

It's one of the leading products in the market today. Everybody likes it.

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it_user558351 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP Web Authentication Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It provides single sign on for our company’s intranet. With that, when you log in, you don't need to enter your name and a password. It provides simple, secure access to company's intranet sites.

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it_user351696 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Manager at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

The best feature would be single sign-on across multiple applications for our customer-facing sites. We don't want our customers to have to enter their user ID and password multiple times. We have a suite of a dozen or so sites as well as about 200 external sites that we federate with. Single sign-on is important, and federation is important.

We have a standardized way of integrating with applications so the application owners don't have to handle authentication or security. We handle that for them, so we use the burden from other application owners.

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UA
Sr. Manager at Duroob Technology

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.

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it_user558246 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Lead at Exelon

The security and single sign-on (SSO) features are the most valuable.

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it_user558159 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Security Analyst at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

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

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NP
Project Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution is easy to use for our managers.

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it_user572931 - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Delivery Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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AS
Systems-Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • 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.
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it_user778881 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Ease of use for the user 
  • Security, of course
  • The ease of setup and installation
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it_user558573 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user351534 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead - Security Services Group at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user58431 - PeerSpot reviewer
Delivery Manager - Technology - Identity and Access Management at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable features are:

  • Ease of deployment, and
  • It’s customizable within the user interface.
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it_user346296 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Technical Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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it_user778932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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

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it_user440760 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Operations at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Simplified federation
  • Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA)

Our customer had two requirements:

  • Authentication without any challenges
  • Access to the partner's application without any additional login required

The first requirement got covered by IWA. The second requirement was covered by simplified federation.

IWA is an out-of-the-box feature. The SAML-based federation is standard for all tools. However, CA Single Sign-On has made the federation configuration way too simple and handy to set up and use.

Updates as on 09/21/2017

CA SSO is helping us a lot in providing the access solution to the customers. The enhanced features in the Simplified federation and the support for a number of different User store types allow us to support almost anything that customer needs. Very pleased with the new Reporting tool from CA that has ut of the bx integration capabilities with CA SSO and is an excellent tool for simplified and useful reports.

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it_user558633 - PeerSpot reviewer
Design Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

This solution is meeting our requirements for all of our applications. The newer version supports Grid Authentication.

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it_user558531 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Compliance Specialist at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The flexibility; the multiple authentication schemes you can use; and the fact that you can use SiteMinder single sign-on to protect web services and web applications.

Customer support has been great too. CA has been good with my questions, getting us solutions for our two factor off, which we implemented a few years ago. They worked with us to get that rolled out. It's really flexible; and I think that's my favorite part.

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it_user354783 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. IT Security Architect at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I helps us to secure all of our web applications -- internal or external- or customer based, or provider-based, or partner-agents -- with access control. It's a one-stop shop. We can have a single user interface that has centralized policy-based and rule-based access controls.

It's easy to execute, robust, and secure.

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it_user353421 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Analyst at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature is basically what it promises. It gives us a platform for strong authentication and authorization with access control. Another strong feature that we like is actually its simplicity of operations and administration. It's fairly simple to grasp the concepts and administer the servers and the policies.

Without it we would rely solely on straight basic authentication to our user directories, and that obviously just doesn't work. There's no auditing on it so audit-ability is another big feature that is tremendously helpful especially in this day and age of auditing and data breaches.

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it_user304782 - PeerSpot reviewer
Middleware specialist at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
  • Security configuration
  • Flexibility
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MN
Cyber Security Specialist at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees

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

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it_user778521 - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Minder Admin at a construction company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user353775 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature for us is the configuration feature. It permits us to connect our company to the offices of our subsidiaries. So, when we buy a company we can connect their IT infrastructure to ours.

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it_user348408 - PeerSpot reviewer
IdAM Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Its flexibility and ease-of-use are the most valuable features.

The objects are tied together well in the administrator UI. It's flexible and easy to use, and the the policy store schema has been structured well.

It provides auditing and secure cookies, as well.

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SA
IT Security Consultant at Duroob Technology

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

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it_user354801 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is reliable.

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it_user348447 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Security Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It provides good security as a single sign-on tool and is easy to integrate with various applications. Also, the admin UI it provides is very user-friendly.

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it_user351468 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Analyst at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I really like the robust functionality that this solution offers, such as federation, OAuth, security, and multi-tenancy, just to name a few.

It really helps us and, importantly, it's very easy to use.

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Buyer's Guide
Symantec Siteminder
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Symantec Siteminder. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.