Navigating Innovation, Addressing Challenges, and Delivering Value with MCP

The artificial intelligence landscape continues to shift daily, yet few innovations have generated as much excitement, and many more questions, as the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Since Anthropic introduced MCP in late 2024, the protocol has rapidly evolved from a promising technical proposal into a widely adopted interface, especially among enterprises eager to orchestrate new levels of automation and context sharing between models and systems. This article traces the evolution of MCP, examines the rapid pace of adoption in the open source community, and explores the unique challenges and opportunities that Prompt360 is tackling to realize MCP’s full potential within enterprise environments.

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The Genesis of Model Context Protocol

When Anthropic unveiled the Model Context Protocol in late 2024, the AI community, including Prompt360 , immediately sensed that something significant was afoot. MCP was conceived as a standardized, language-agnostic way for machine learning models and applications to exchange context, instructions, and data payloads. The protocol’s promise lay in its ability to break down interoperability barriers, enabling seamless orchestration of models, agents, and enterprise system regardless of vendor, language, or underlying infrastructure.

MCP’s initial specification was elegant in its simplicity: a protocol focused on describing the “context” around a model’s operation in a structured, machine-readable format. From the outset, the Anthropic vision was clear: MCP would serve as the foundation for a new era of composable, context-aware AI.

By early 2025, MCP had moved from concept to early experimental deployments. Anthropic released reference implementations, and a small and highly productive group of early adopters began to experiment. The results were promising - previously non-deterministic systems could now “understand” operational context, coordinate with other services, and deliver contextually driven results.

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The Avalanche: Open Source Adoption and Deployment

The open source community’s response to MCP was nothing short of extraordinary. Within months, individuals and teams worldwide were hacking together MCP servers, building adapters, and integrating the protocol into everything from chatbots to workflow engines. This collective energy resulted in an ecosystem of MCP implementations available in virtually every major programming language.

What’s more remarkable is the sheer speed at which these deployments occurred. On platforms like GitHub, new MCP server projects appeared almost daily. Community run registries and directories appeared, with hundreds of repos using ready made frameworks like Python FastMCP and Rust-based edge agents. Companies with a stake in AI and automation rushed to develop MCP servers, eager to experiment and gain a foothold in what many perceive as the next wave of enterprise transformation.

Notably, the open source community has surpassed the pace of commercial vendors. MCP has empowered individual developers and small teams to contribute enhancements, fix bugs, and propose extensions. The result is a protocol that is both robust and flexible, with a vibrant ecosystem of implementations and tools.

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Emerging and Latent Concerns: The Complex Reality of MCP Deployments

Yet, for all the excitement, cracks have begun to appear beneath the surface. As the number of MCP servers multiplies, several emerging and latent concerns deserve careful attention. This applies especially for organizations seeking to operationalize MCP in the security-conscious context of the enterprise.

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1. Deployment Without Engagement: The “Orphan Server” Phenomenon

One striking pattern is the proliferation of MCP servers that, despite being developed in large numbers, see little to no actual adoption or enhancement after their initial introduction. Many of these code bases were set up during the early months of 2025, when MCP was the new frontier and experimentation was prolific. However, enthusiasm often outpaced sustained engagement. It’s not uncommon to discover an “orphan” MCP server with a stale repository on GitHub without any recent updates.  Given the pace of change in the MCP spec, this creates risk: an MCP server without continuous improvement becomes a liability, introducing technical debt, incompatibilities, and security vulnerabilities into enterprise environments. This leaves users to determine which servers to use, and which ones to avoid.

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2. The Legacy of Local Desktop Deployments

Another vestige of MCP’s rapid adoption is the prevalence of “local desktop deploy” patterns. Early MCP servers were designed to run on a developer’s laptop—accessible only via localhost, with little thought to network accessibility, security, or scalability. While this was ideal for prototyping and experimentation, it has proven to be a stumbling block for organizations seeking to deploy MCP at scale.

Transitioning these legacy deployments to robust, governed and reusable architectures is non-trivial, requiring not just technical rework but also new approaches to registration, authentication, and lifecycle management.

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3. The Authentication Gap

The total absence of authentication in the first wave of MCP servers was immediately called out by the community. These initial implementations typically assumed a closed, local environment, with static credentials or hardcoded API keys. In an enterprise context, this is a severe limitation. Robust identity and access management (IAM) is non-negotiable, especially when the MCP server mediates access to sensitive data or critical business processes.

Without support for modern authentication mechanisms—such as OAuth and OIDC —MCP servers risk undermining organizational security and compliance mandates.   MCP potentially obviates strong PAM practices; MCP implementations must be carefully implemented to avoid this potential risk.

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4. Protocol Evolution: The Transition from stdio and SSE to Streamable HTTP(s)

Finally, there is the matter of protocol evolution. The first MCP servers relied heavily on stdio or Server-Sent Events (SSE) for streaming data, a pattern that works well for some applications but is ill-suited to others, particularly in enterprise environments with strict network policies and requirements for high-throughput, low-latency communication.

The MCP specification has since evolved to embrace more flexible, streamable HTTP(s) paradigms, but adoption is uneven. Some MCP servers have been updated, while others implement earlier approaches. This inconsistency presents interoperability challenges and complicates integration efforts, particularly when trying to orchestrate workflows across a heterogeneous landscape of MCP implementations.   By implication, this creates a mishmash of technical approaches to leverage the MCP servers themselves, creating an unwieldy testing matrix for any production deployment.

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“Some Assembly Required”: The Incongruity of Enterprise MCP Adoption

Taken together, these factors have created a situation where a many open source MCP servers demand substantial “assembly” from would-be enterprise consumers. For developers, this might be an acceptable tradeoff, giving them a chance to improve and innovate. But for knowledge workers, who are another dominant pool of value drivers in the enterprise, it is a significant barrier.

Knowledge workers are not necessarily software engineers; they are domain experts, analysts, and operators seeking to harness MCP’s power to drive automation and insight in business flows and operations. Requiring them to fiddle around with server setup, language runtime installs, source code management, container building, protocol quirks, or authentication gaps is both incongruous and counterproductive.

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Prompt360’s Focus: Enterprise-Ready MCP for Real Outcomes

At Prompt360, we recognize both the promise and the pain points of MCP in the enterprise. Our efforts are focused on bridging the gap between the protocol’s technical possibilities and its practical, transformative impact on business.

·      Hardened MCP Deployments: We are committed to delivering MCP servers that are accessible, scalable, and battle-tested in real-world enterprise environments. Our deployments support robust registration, monitoring, and lifecycle management out of the box – and are implemented with security first principles applied.

·      Security & Compliance by Default: Security and Authentication is not an afterthought. Prompt360 MCP is designed to re-use the existing PAM controls within the enterprise, ensuring that only authorized users and systems can interact with sensitive data from those systems.   We deliver MCP through a governed software supply chain to minimize risks.

·      Opinionated approach: Our platform maintains curated MCP servers aligned with protocol specs.  Our customers don’t need to manage this, as our platform does this for them, reducing technical debt and risk while focusing on value for the business.  We also validate for functionality and results, removing guesswork for common use cases required by our customers.

·      User-Centric Integration: Perhaps most critically, Prompt360 is building interfaces and integrations designed for knowledge workers, not just developers. Our product abstracts away the technical complexity of MCP, empowering business users to compose, orchestrate, and automate without writing code and inadvertently introducing risks.

·     MCP's are isolated from each other to prevent cross-MCP abuse with strong network controls and governance.

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The Road Ahead: Automation Enabler

MCP’s ascent from a novel protocol to a cornerstone of enterprise automation is a testament to the ingenuity and drive of the open source and developer communities. However, true transformation will only be realized when MCP is accessible, secure, and intuitive enough for non-technical users to wield its full power.

At Prompt360 , we believe that by addressing these challenges and focusing on security, accessibility, and user experience. The era of “some assembly required” is ending; the era of seamless, enterprise-ready MCP has only just begun.