Thursday, March 29, 2018

CA SiteMinder - Drawbacks

Common to all Single Sign-On products that have been out there in the market for the past 10 years, most provide agent-based solutions. 

Agent-based solutions have been working like a charm. But they have been a pain operationally.

  1. Cost of Agent management grows as the deployment grows
  2. Application owners and developers concerned about time to deploy
  3. Need to coordinate with application owners for upgrades




These are very true points from our experience deploying multiple large-scale SSO solutions in the past.

One of the workaround is not to deploy agent on every application server. Instead, deploy a Reverse Proxy farm (RP farm). This is a centrally controlled farm with Apache HTTPd server with agents deployed.



Of course, bad points aside, there are benefits to having agent-based solutions.


  1. Broad application coverage
  2. Security
  3. Scalability





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