The hard part of an MCP gateway is auth

Sierra’s experience building an internal Model Context Protocol gateway shows that connecting agents to 45 services for most employees was less constrained by integrations than by the underlying identity, authorization, consent, and auditing systems needed for safe deployment. Its approach included per-tool permissions, organization-scoped access, detailed audit records, session-limited human approvals for exceptions, customer-data classification for unstructured sources, and separate least-privilege identities for interactive users, scheduled workflows, and agents. The discussion argues that MCP specifications have historically left important gateway behaviors, including authorization propagation and client identity, insufficiently defined, causing companies to develop similar private solutions. It also notes that gateways cannot cover every workflow, since agents may use established command-line tools or custom extensions that introduce additional credential surfaces and require controls beyond a proxy. Recent MCP standards favor Client ID Metadata Documents over Dynamic Client Registration, while the broader conclusion is that organizations should build specialized controls unique to their data but consider using established identity, OAuth, permission, and audit infrastructure for common authorization requirements.

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