What is an MCP Gateway?

As the number of MCP servers an organization uses grows, connecting every client directly to every server becomes unmanageable — credentials get duplicated, there's no single place to audit calls, and rolling out a new access policy means touching every client config. A gateway solves this by becoming the one place clients talk to; it holds the actual server connections, applies authentication and authorization centrally, and can enforce rate limits, logging, and data-loss-prevention rules on every tool call that passes through. Gateways typically also handle protocol translation and session multiplexing — presenting many backend servers as a single logical endpoint, and managing OAuth token refresh or API-key rotation so individual clients never need to. This is especially valuable in multi-tenant products where different customers or teams need different subsets of tools exposed, since the gateway can scope what each caller sees without each server implementing its own tenant logic. The cost is an added hop and a new piece of infrastructure that itself needs to be secured, monitored, and kept highly available, since every MCP call now depends on it.