MCP server

If the Model Context Protocol is the standard, an MCP server is the thing that implements it for a specific system. It advertises a set of tools (typically read, search, create, update operations), and any MCP client — Claude Code, Cursor, and others — can discover those tools and call them mid-task.

The protocol part is the easy part; there are community and official servers for many popular systems. What separates a demo from something a team can rely on is everything around it: credentials scoped to least privilege, read-only defaults, rate and cost guards, audit logs on every call, and a human approval gate on anything destructive.

The strategic value is reuse. Build the server once and every agent and engineer in the company reaches that system through the same governed path, instead of each team hand-rolling its own integration with its own credentials.