Securing MCP servers before the AI rollout outpaces security

Source: CSO Online · OCT 29, 2026

Your company’s CTO has a plan to implement your company’s first LLM-based application. The board approved it, and now you’re finding out about it. It’s a typical story I hear all the time, and I’ve lived it myself. You’ve heard everything about models and LLMs, but now you see this new term all over the place: Model Context Protocol ( MCP ) servers —and the realization that you now need to make sure they are implemented securely. What is an MCP server? MCP servers are like the ODBC of the 1990s. Before ODBC , every application needed custom code to query databases. ODBC defined a single standard on how to talk to databases, and database vendors just developed a driver to talk to their solution. MCP servers work in the same way: the AI app just needs to use the standardized methods to communicate with the local MCP host, and each available tool (databases, file shares, CRMs) provides an MCP server that translates the MCP transmissions into the tool’s native format. So, you just need a d