Evaluating Benefits and Tradeoffs

As you design your deployment architecture, be sure to consider the benefits, tradeoffs. The following lists may help you determine if enabling federation using SiteMinder and OpenSSO Enterprise is appropriate to meet your business needs.

Benefits

• OpenSSO Enterprise allows you to continue using an existing SiteMinder deployment for authentication while leveraging the more advanced features of Federation Access Manager.

• OpenSSO Enterprise quickly enables federation protocols for SiteMinder without few changes to the existing infrastructure.

• OpenSSO Enterprise supports a variety of industry standard protocols such as SAMLv2 , ID-FF, ID-WSF, WS-Federation, XACML, WS-*, and others.

• OpenSSO Enterprise supports any generic LDAP repository for users, and can work with the existing SiteMinder database.

• OpenSSO Enterprise leverages its own configuration data store, which minimizes the need to migrate data from a different data store.

Tradeoffs

In general, when integrating any two access management products, you must consider the increased costs in resources and maintenance.

• When co-locating SiteMinder and OpenSSO, session management for both the products must be synchronized.

• Full integration requires you to set up session synchronization, possibly by using notification mechanisms effectively

• Administrators must be trained and proficient in the use of both products.