Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) and A2A Protocols Tackle Enterprise Agent Challenges
The development of enterprise agents is facing obstacles, as builders struggle to hard-code all essential tools and data, resulting in systems that are brittle and inflexible. However, two foundational standards, Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent-to-agent (A2A) protocols, have emerged to address these challenges. Anthropic, in November 2024, published MCP as an open standard to facilitate AI system integration with external tools and data. A2A protocols, meanwhile, define rules for inter-agent communication.
MCP manages and shares structured memory, task state, and environmental assumptions across sessions and models, enabling interoperability among enterprise agents. However, these standards also introduce new security, performance, and governance challenges. As the agentic AI market reaches its infrastructure inflection point, it's crucial to address these issues.
The real control plane for agents is expected to emerge as a higher-order construct built upon MCP and A2A. While MCP is not a control plane or policy engine, it serves as a distributed cache or shared memory abstraction, facilitating communication and data exchange. Security in agentic architectures, like other systems, taxes performance, flexibility, and reliability.
MCP, developed by Anthropic, is rapidly becoming a standard layer in agentic systems. However, it also presents a potential surface for exploitation. As the market evolves, addressing the new challenges posed by MCP and A2A will be vital for the growth and security of enterprise agent systems.
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