Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite Plus vs. Symantec VIP

Good if you want a temporary solution to too many passwords.

Incentivized

Symantec VIP is well suited for enterprise institutions, like our own, managing a wide range of devices and wanting to provide their users with an extra layer of security. Being able to have 2-factor authentication with a unique pin was key for us and this would be well suited for any organization that holds sensitive information like, in our case, student records. They have great support and getting issues resolved does not take much time, a quick call to support usually straightens issues out.

Incentivized

• Flexible to work with most web sites and thick clients
• Avoids users having to type their passwords repeatedly
• Fairly performant

Incentivized

• VIP access manager is great at setting up multiple tokens for the same user.
• VIP access manager is great at managing multiple users simultaneously.
• VIP access manager can be accessed from the web, the browser-based interface makes it easy to connect.

Incentivized

• This tool is essentially a hack, making the user experience pretty weak. For example, we use it in an application which has a box to type your password. Every time you enter some data, ESSO steals the focus and types your password into the box, even if you aren't about to submit the form requiring the password.
• This tool creates a 2nd CN in the directory and this broke some of our applications which were only expecting a single CN per user in the directory. Why can't it use a traditional database instead?
• This tool caused performance issues with Putty. It would peg our CPUs at 100% if the user had Putty running. It took a very long time to resolve the issue.

Incentivized

• Reliability on the app. Most users dislike having the authentication app on their cell phone because if they don't have their cellular device on-hand then they're unable to authenticate.
• Perhaps a bio-metric enhancement in the near future would take this application to the next level.

Incentivized

Great vendor support, along with a great product solution

Incentivized

There's no substitute for properly developed applications that delegate authentication to an external system like Active Directory or a cloud identity provider. That way, the issues with screen scraping and constantly-breaking integration are solved permanently.

Incentivized

Duo is good but Symantec VIP really takes the cake. Both Symantec VIP and Duo Security are used as a two factor application but Symantec VIP also allows you to use physical tokens. Some of our users prefer those over their phones and we can easily leverage Symantec VIP for that.

Incentivized

• We spent a lot of time implementing it on different applications. However, because it uses screen scraping, every time our apps upgraded, it broke the integration with ESSO, so we had to keep fixing the integration. After a few years, we have stopped integrating new apps with it due to this headache.

Incentivized

• It was as easy to implement and manage as promised, so that definitely saved us time and frustration.
• It allowed us to improve on our existing PHI and PII security measures.
• Allowing secure access from remote locations, especially smart phones, was a huge plus.

Incentivized