Should You Build Your Integration Layer or Adopt One?

If your organisation is exploring MCP server gateways, you are probably asking yourself whether to build your own or use a pre-built solution. Both are possible, but the choice affects time, cost, scalability, and maintenance.

Here is a clear look at what each path involves, with examples to make the decision more concrete.

Challenges of building your own MCP gateway

Building your own gateway gives you full control, but it is a significant undertaking. The key challenges fall into five areas.

Identity and access management

• •Set up OAuth, token rotation, and refresh flows.
• •Support single sign-on.
• •Implement multi-tenant role-based access control if different teams use the gateway.

For instance, one company had to integrate the gateway with their HR system so employee access would provision and revoke automatically. Managing that by hand would have been a nightmare.

Communication and compatibility

• •Ensure every request and response between MCP servers works correctly.
• •Handle servers running different versions or connection types.

An AI agent relying on multiple MCP servers will fail if one server cannot understand the response from another.

Monitoring and logging

• •Track requests end to end.
• •Detect anomalies and misuse early.

You want to catch an agent making unusually high-volume requests before it brings the system down.

Deployment and scalability

• •Local servers do not scale well, so remote deployment and its security become necessary.
• •Avoid conflicts between the different teams or departments using the gateway.

In practice, multiple departments sharing one gateway without proper isolation causes slowdowns or errors.

Time, maintenance, and long-term ownership

• •Building a gateway is a months-long effort with ongoing updates.
• •Continuous work is needed to stay compliant with the MCP specification.

How pre-built gateways address these challenges

Adopting a pre-built solution reduces complexity and lets your team focus on delivering value instead of infrastructure.

• •Ready-to-use identity and access management: OAuth, RBAC, and SSO included, so teams can onboard new employees immediately without custom scripts.
• •Compliance handled for you: MCP specification updates are managed automatically, with no risk of breaking the system when the protocol changes.
• •Multi-tenant deployments managed: different departments can use the gateway at the same time without conflicts.
• •Built-in monitoring and alerts: failed requests and unusual traffic are detected automatically.
• •Focus on core value: developers and product teams concentrate on AI features and integrations instead of managing tokens, servers, or logs.

Decision guide

• •Full control and customisation, build. Ideal if your platform requires unique authentication flows for internal and external teams.
• •MCP infrastructure is core, build. Choose this if your product itself is the MCP gateway or infrastructure.
• •Quick deployment and low maintenance, buy. Suits teams that want fast results, such as marketing or R&D teams using AI agents without a dedicated DevOps team.
• •Multi-tenant support and scaling, buy. Necessary if multiple departments need to run AI workflows simultaneously without conflicts.
• •Focus on AI features and integrations, buy. Best when your priority is building AI capabilities, not maintaining the underlying infrastructure.

Summary

• •Access and identity. Build: full control, but complex setup with OAuth, SSO, and multi-tenant RBAC. Buy: ready-to-use OAuth, SSO, and RBAC with instant onboarding.
• •Server compatibility. Build: handle multiple MCP servers, versions, and protocols manually. Buy: automatic cross-server compatibility and updates.
• •Monitoring and alerts. Build: create end-to-end tracking and anomaly detection yourself. Buy: monitoring, alerts, and anomaly detection included.
• •Deployment and scaling. Build: local servers limit scalability and conflicts between teams are likely. Buy: managed multi-tenant deployment on scalable infrastructure.
• •Time and maintenance. Build: months of work plus ongoing MCP compliance. Buy: low maintenance, with updates handled for you.
• •Focus and productivity. Build: infrastructure-heavy, diverting resources from AI work. Buy: teams stay focused on AI features and integrations.

Read more about fastn Connect, previously the Unified Context Layer.