The proliferation of MCP has meant that developer teams are being inundated with requests to set up new MCP servers and custom tooling as teams try to realize business value from a new technology.
Without the right tools, these projects are facing roadblocks when it’s time to ship the final product: security reviews, credential management, and unclear DevOps workflows complicate developers’ ability to make these tools available to business teams.
What most companies face now is the need to control their agentic infrastructure: how to secure and manage agents, MCP servers, tool catalogs, and credentials.
Hosted MCP Servers help to eliminate these bottlenecks. With complete control over MCP server deployment, IT and DevOps teams can:
- Deploy from JSON: Ship any MCP server to your existing infrastructure with no DevOps queue.
- Secrets stay secret: Credentials are assigned through Oauth or your identity provider, and injected at deploy time via your vault.
- Runtime control: Toggle tools on or off instantly, with no redeploy and no code changes.
- Governance built in: Risk analysis, permissions, audit logs, and auto-hibernation ship out of the box.
By creating an MCP server deployment infrastructure that is ready to govern and monitor agent connections, IT teams are able to operationalize MCP for business teams without sacrificing security or operational control.
The Downsides of Vendor-Published MCP Servers
Vendors publish MCP servers to help you use their own products, but those servers are not built to accommodate your enterprise environment. When an MCP server needs to also account for the internal context of your proprietary data warehouse, internal Jira instance, and custom internal products, vendor-provided servers can be inadequate for enterprise workflows.
3 examples of the limits of vendor-published MCP servers:
- A developer wraps an internal proprietary data source in a custom MCP server and needs it running where your agents or co-pilots can reach it.
- Your organization runs an enterprise server internally (Atlassian, for example) and wants to expose it as an MCP server inside the cluster, not by calling a public endpoint.
- An engineer is building net-new AI tooling and needs a place to deploy it without standing up new infrastructure.
The Benefits of Hosted MCP Servers
These bottlenecks are eliminated when your teams have internal infrastructure for deploying secure, governed MCP servers:
For developers: Deploy from a standard JSON definition with standard schema, and fully own the code.
For security: Manage credentials at the tool and user level without the risk of exposing secrets to users or public services, and have visibility into what a server exposes before it goes live.
For DevOps: MCP servers run inside the infrastructure you already manage, without cross-cluster networking headaches or instance wrangling.
For the organization: By enforcing policy-based access, built-in audit trails, and cost controls, MCP servers become another controlled, predictable part of the tech stack instead of another shadow IT headache.
How Boomi simplifies hosting MCP servers
Hosted MCP Servers are a core capability in Boomi AI Gateway.
Developers package their server (Docker, NPX, or UVX) and provide a standard MCP JSON configuration. An admin uploads the config to the MCP Gateway panel, and Boomi provisions the instance inside the cluster. There is no DevOps ticket, no cross-cluster networking, and no developer access to infrastructure.
The server runs on the same cluster as Boomi AI Gateway, instantly reachable by any authorized agent or client with version tracking, health status, CPU and memory utilization, last activity, and centralized logs, all without cluster access. Each instance gets a dedicated internal endpoint.
Five key benefits of hosting your MCP servers in Boomi
1. Secrets management
A typical Slack MCP config tells the story: secrets are not abstracted, they are inline. API keys, tokens, and credentials are hardcoded and visible to anyone with file access.
{ "slack": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-slack" ], "env": { "SLACK_BOT_TOKEN": "xoxb-XXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXX", "SLACK_TEAM_ID": "YYYYYYYYYYY", "SLACK_CHANNEL_IDS": "AAAAAAAAA, BBBBBBBB, CCCCCCCC" } }}
These embedded credentials are a major exposure risk.
Hosted MCP Server changes the model:
- MCP Gateway never stores or manages secrets, only references them.
- DevOps defines secrets in your existing manager (AWS Secrets Manager, Vault, and similar tools) and injects them via Helm as Kubernetes secrets.
- Admins reference secret names at deploy time, never raw values.
- Environment variables are injected once, establish the connection, and are never logged or persisted.
After deployment, users connect to the instance through an internal cluster endpoint. There is no public exposure and no credentials in transit. The server and its configuration remain fully isolated.
Here is what that same Slack MCP server looks like when hosted:
{ "slack": { "url": "http://mcpx-019af856-9c1c-77c1-a78b-cd3f3d4ca6c3:9000/mcp", "type": "streamable-http", "headers": {} }}
In early MCP adoptions, credential exposure was a real and recurring problem: tokens shared in Slack threads, config files passed around, and screenshots taken without a second thought. Encapsulation eliminates this risk entirely, not by demanding better discipline from your team, but by making exposure structurally impossible.
2. Tool-level control
Every deployed server exposes a structured manifest of tools, parameters, and required permissions. Admins enable or disable individual tools without code changes. If a server has both read and write database access, you can approve the reads and disable the writes in the same session, with no developer involvement.
For teams thinking about how tool exposure affects agent performance and security at runtime, see Why Dynamic Tool Discovery Solves the Context Management Problem.
3. Automated risk analysis
When a Hosted MCP Server is created, every tool is automatically analyzed for parameter types, token scopes, permissions, and risk, powered by your own LLM. Security gets a complete capability view before users can connect, for every server and every deployment, with no manual inspection required. For a full breakdown of the MCP attack vectors this addresses, see MCP Risk Analysis.
4. Instance management and hibernation
Instances run in the AI Gateway cluster, hibernate when idle, and wake on demand. Admins see version, health, CPU and memory usage, and last activity. Costs track actual usage, with no manual management required.
5. Shared access with policy control
A single hosted instance serves many users in the organization. Admins control access based on permissions assigned in Boomi AI Gateway. The developer does not manage multiple deployments or coordinate access. One instance, one internal address, access governed by company policy.
Trust Boomi to Help You Govern MCP Servers Across the Enterprise
Boomi provides you with a control tower for MCP, going beyond just connecting systems by making them securely consumable for agents and applying policy, identity, access control, and audit trails across every managed asset. Boomi turns your company’s existing integrations, APIs, legacy applications, and data into discoverable tools with no custom builds and no re-platforming, just one-click enablement.
With Boomi API Gateway you can control every AI interaction across your enterprise: agents, MCP, tools, and more. Knowledge workers get real-time access to enterprise applications from inside the AI tools they regularly use, whether that’s Claude, Copilot, Gemini, or any MCP client, while providing IT the control and visibility to allow it.
Boomi brings together:
- 1,000+ pre-built connectors available across every major enterprise application
- An admin control center, where IT provisions specific users and groups with exactly the access they need
- Always-on, CISO-ready auditing, logging every tool call, user, action, timestamp, and outcome, from the first call with no configuration required
- OAuth exchange, token handling, and refresh cycles, with support for organization-level credentials as well as per-user identity through OAuth pass-through
- Context-rich metadata to feed agents so they understand how to work with complex business processes
The Boomi catalog is vendor-agnostic, unifying servers from its own registry, from third parties, and from the Official MCP Registry into one governed repository. Plus, as Boomi is the only platform with a bidirectional link to that official registry, it can both consume from and publish to the open standard.
Boomi also handles the full lifecycle with scoped control all the way from creation through retirement:
- Servers register automatically
- Third-party servers bulk-import into a production-ready catalog
- Subregistries handle team-level access
- Real-time monitoring with anomaly detection watches behavior in flight
Are you tired of just guessing at what your agents can reach? Check out Securing the Agentic Enterprise: A CISO’s Guide to AI Governance and Control.