A SiteMinder Agent is a client of the Agent API. The agent enforces access control policies served by the Policy Server. The Policy Server is a general-purpose policy engine with no specific knowledge of resources. The specific knowledge of resources is provided by SiteMinder agents. Agents establish resource semantics and act as gate keepers to protect resources from unauthorized users.
Different agent types protect different kinds of resources. Some agent types are pre-defined, standard agents that are shipped as part of the SiteMinder product—for example, the Web Agent, which provides HTTP access control for Web Servers. However, you can also use the Agent API to implement custom agents.
The Agent API lets you create a custom agent that can authenticate and authorize users in a variety of context-specific ways. For example, you could create an agent for FTP transfers that does the following:
Custom agents can participate in a single sign-on environment with standard SiteMinder Web Agents.