Cloudflare joined forces with Wiz to stymie the rapid spread of shadow AI across enterprise environments, the two companies said in a Tuesday announcement. The strategic partnership aims to bring real-time oversight to edge environments and comes close on the heels of Google Cloud’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz, which closed last month.
“Existing security tools weren’t designed for the speed or complexity of AI adoption, where applications are being built and deployed faster than teams can track,” Tom Evans, chief partner officer at Cloudflare, told Channel Dive. “As a result, many organizations don’t have clear visibility into where AI is being used or what data it is interacting with.”
AI deployment headaches are an opportunity for security vendors and the channel partners who manage enterprise IT estates. The integration of Cloudflare’s AI Security for Apps endpoint detection, released into general availability last month, with Wiz Security Graph cloud protection helps organizations discover where AI is used, determine what data it touches and intervene in real time.
A lack of governance has fueled the rise of shadow AI, defined as the unsanctioned use of AI tools and models inside organizations.
The trigger points are fairly mundane, the risks significant. For example, Evans said, without governed AI access, employees may paste sensitive data into public LLMs to get work done faster, while developers lacking oversight embed AI into data-rich applications.
“What makes this particularly challenging is that it expands the organization’s attack surface without visibility or control, increasing the risk of sensitive data exposure or unmonitored AI behavior,” Evans said. “In many cases, CISOs do not have a complete picture of how widely AI tools are already being used across the business.”
The Cloudflare-Wiz integration combines discovery and enforcement into one workflow. Wiz maps AI applications, data flows and exposed areas across the environment and Cloudflare applies guardrails — including protections against prompt injection and unsafe outputs — at the edge. By feeding Cloudflare’s security rules into the Wiz Security Graph, teams can prioritize exposures based on exploitability and enforce policies at runtime, giving IT a unified view of potential trouble spots across multicloud environments, the companies said in the announcement.
“Our approach helps bring clarity … by giving teams visibility into where AI is being used and how it is interacting with sensitive data, and then surfacing which risks are most likely to be exploited or have real impact,” Evans said. “This allows security teams to focus on the highest-priority exposures while still enabling AI adoption to move forward.”
The integration gives channel partners an opportunity to replace fragmented security tools with a unified AI governance framework that bridges the gap between the edge and the cloud.
“For our MSPs, SIs and VARs, it means moving from reactive troubleshooting to proactive enablement — empowering them to discover shadow AI, automate risk prioritization and secure their customers' innovation at scale without architectural complexity,” said Evans. “It shifts the conversation from selling individual security widgets to providing comprehensive AI governance.”
But by teaming up, Cloudflare and Wiz integration say they’re helping security teams and channel partners make more informed decisions about security risks by surfacing which exposures are most likely to be exploited or cause impact.
“Security alignment isn’t just about reducing risk, it’s an enabler of AI application development,” said Oron Noah, VP of product, extensibility and partnerships at Wiz, in a press release. “This partnership gives organizations a unified view of AI application endpoints and shared risk context, helping them stop threats like prompt injection and shadow AI before they start.”
Evans agreed, calling AI a “black box” that poses difficult management challenges.
“When talking with CISOs today, they are struggling with the balance of being an enabler of innovation with AI, while combating uncontrolled shadow AI across their organization because their legacy security tools are effectively useless at this level,” Evans said. “The Cloudflare and Wiz partnership helps tackle this trade-off. Now, we are delivering a solution to allow innovation with AI at speed, without the worry that their most sensitive data will be exposed.”
