Harness, the AI Software Delivery Platform™ company, announced the Harness AppSec Alliance, a strategic partner ecosystem that brings together best-of-breed application security, API and Agent security capabilities on a single platform. The Alliance is designed to help resellers, systems integrators, and technology partners capture a fast-growing and largely unaddressed share of security spend as agentic AI accelerates both software delivery and the vulnerabilities that come with it.
As enterprises accelerate AI adoption, the attack surface has fundamentally shifted and expanded. AI agents, LLM-powered microservices, and MCP-enabled integrations introduce new vectors that traditional security tools were not built to address. According to Harness’s State of AI-Native Application Security report, 62% of organizations have no visibility into where LLMs are in use across their environment, and 74% say AI sprawl will outpace API sprawl when it comes to risk. Partners without application security or secure-deployment offerings are leaving a substantial share of that spend on the table because they have nothing to quote. Customers select point solutions that create gaps in coverage and challenges in operationalization.
“Every partner conversation we’re having right now starts the same way: customers are already spending on AI-driven security, but their reseller or integrator can’t follow the budget into application security,” said Tom O’Reilly, Senior Vice President, Worldwide GTM Partnerships at Harness. “The Harness AppSec Alliance closes that gap. We’re bringing partners application security technology, built into one platform, so they can walk into an existing account and pick up spend they were never able to compete for before.”
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Why Now: The Bottleneck Has Moved to Application Security
While the attack surface has expanded, the real crisis is no longer just discovering vulnerabilities. It is the speed at which organizations can respond to them. Modern AI systems can surface vulnerabilities far faster than security teams can triage, validate, and patch. This creates an operational bottleneck where organizations are flooded with findings but lack the capacity to remediate them, leaving them exposed despite having “visibility.”
That shift is showing up directly in how customers buy. 75% of security professionals believe shadow AI will eclipse shadow IT as the defining enterprise security threat, yet most organizations still have no way to track it. Analysts and vendors alike are pointing to the same inflection point on recent investor calls: security budgets are reallocating toward the tools that can keep pace with AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery and AI-generated code.
Most security partners are well positioned on network, endpoint, and cloud security, but few have application security and secure software delivery in their portfolio. That leaves four customer problems largely unaddressed:
- Gaps in runtime protection. Agentic attacks are biased toward APIs and increasingly use chained attack paths. Traditional WAFs are blind to attacks that unfold over time and aren’t built to secure APIs at scale.
- Signal overload. The volume of vulnerabilities surfaced by AI-powered scanning is overwhelming security teams, and traditional scanners compound the problem with high false-positive rates.
- Slow exposure audit and triage. When a vulnerability is disclosed in a widely used open-source package, it can take customers days to a year to find every instance of that package across their estate, while attackers exploit it in hours.
- Delayed patch windows. None of the above matters if it still takes weeks to ship a fix. Finding a vulnerability faster is only useful if the organization can patch just as fast.
A Single Platform Built for the AI Threat Era
The Harness AppSec Alliance is anchored on Harness’s application security capabilities, which partners can now package, resell, and deploy as part of the broader Harness AI Software Delivery Platform:
- Shift left with SAST & SCA. AI-powered static analysis with reachability analysis, prompt and skill scanning, built natively into the CI/CD pipeline, cutting false positives through deduplication and intelligent prioritization.
- Software and AI Supply Chain Security. SBOM and AIBOM generation, provenance tracking, and attestation so every artifact is tracked, vulnerable artifacts are automatically quarantined, and responses to zero-day vulnerabilities can be accelerated.
- Web Application & API Protection (WAAP). Runtime protection purpose-built for the microservices era, combining WAF, API discovery, bot defense, and runtime attack blocking in a single, API-native control – not a legacy WAF bolted on.
- AI and Agent Security. Holistic offering that includes discovery of all AI endpoints and agents, adversarial AI testing, and an AI firewall enforcing policy at runtime, with agent trace preserving the record of all of it.
SOURCE: PRNewswire