zs-20240731
UNITED STATES
SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20549
_____________________________________
FORM 10-K
_____________________________________
(Mark One)
For the fiscal year ended July 31, 2024
OR
For the transition period from _ to _
Commission File Number: 001-38413
_____________________________________
ZSCALER, INC.
(Exact Name of Registrant as Specified in Its Charter)
_____________________________________
Registrant’s telephone number, including area code: (408) 533-0288
Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:
Title of each class Trading Symbol(s) Name of each exchange on which registered
Common Stock, $0.001 Par Value ZS The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC
Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act:
None
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Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Yes ☒ No ☐
Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act. Yes ☐ No ☒
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes ☒ No ☐
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically, every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files) Yes ☒ No ☐
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of "large accelerated filer," "accelerated filer," "smaller reporting company" and "emerging growth company" in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.
Large accelerated filer ☒ Accelerated filer ☐
Non-accelerated filer ☐ Smaller reporting company ☐
Emerging growth company ☐
If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report. ☒
If securities are registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act, indicate by check mark whether the financial statements of the registrant included in the filing reflect the correction of an error to previously issued financial statements. ☐
Indicate by check mark whether any of those error corrections are restatements that required a recovery analysis of incentive-based compensation received by any of the registrant's executive officers during the relevant recovery period pursuant to §240.10D-1(b). ☐
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). Yes ☐ No ☒
The aggregate market value of the common stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant, based on the closing price of a share of the registrant's common stock on January 31, 2024 (the last business day of the registrant’s most recently completed second fiscal quarter) as reported by the Nasdaq Global Select Market on such date was approximately $19.8 billion.
As of August 30, 2024, the number of shares of registrant’s common stock outstanding was 152,490,005.
DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE
Portions of the registrant’s definitive Proxy Statement relating to its fiscal year 2024 Annual Meeting of Stockholders are incorporated by reference into Part III of this Form 10-K where indicated. Such Proxy Statement will be filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission within 120 days after the end of the fiscal year to which this Annual Report on Form 10-K relates.
ZSCALER, INC.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
PART I
Item 1. Business 3
Item 1A. Risk Factors 19
Item 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments 57
Item 1C. Cybersecurity 57
Item 2. Properties 58
Item 3. Legal Proceedings 58
Item 4. Mine Safety Disclosures 58
PART II
Item 6. Reserved 61
Item 7A. Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures about Market Risk 83
Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data 85
Item 9A. Controls and Procedures 140
Item 9B. Other Information 141
Item 9C. Disclosure Regarding Foreign Jurisdictions that Prevent Inspections 141
PART III
Item 10. Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance 142
Item 11. Executive Compensation 142
Item 14. Principal Accountant Fees and Services 142
PART IV
Item 15. Exhibits, Financial Statement Schedules 143
Signatures
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SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding our financial outlook and market positioning. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date they were first issued and were based on current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections as well as the beliefs and assumptions of management. The words "believe," "may," "will," "potentially," "estimate," "continue," "anticipate," "intend," "could," "would," "project," "plan," "expect" and similar expressions that convey uncertainty of future events or outcomes are intended to identify forward-looking statements.
These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements concerning the following:
•beliefs about the impact of macroeconomic influences and instability, including the ongoing effects of inflation, and geopolitical events on our business;
•our future financial performance, including our expectations regarding our revenue, cost of revenue, gross profit or gross margin, operating expenses (including changes in sales and marketing, research and development and general and administrative expenses) and our ability to achieve, and maintain, future profitability;
•market acceptance of our cloud platform;
•the effects of increased competition in our markets and our ability to compete effectively;
•our ability to maintain the security and availability of our cloud platform;
•our ability to maintain and expand our customer base, including by attracting new customers;
•our ability to develop new solutions or enhancements to our existing solutions, including artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, and bring them to market in a timely manner;
•market acceptance of any new solutions or enhancements to our existing solutions;
•anticipated trends, growth rates and challenges in our business and in the markets in which we operate;
•our business plan and our ability to effectively manage our growth and associated investments;
•beliefs about and objectives for future operations;
•beliefs about and objectives for future acquisitions, strategic investments, partnerships and alliances and our ability to successfully integrate completed acquisitions;
•our relationships with third parties, including channel partners;
•our ability to maintain, protect and enhance our intellectual property rights;
•our ability to successfully defend litigation brought against us;
•our ability to successfully expand in our existing markets and into new markets;
•sufficiency of cash to meet cash needs for at least the next 12 months and service our outstanding debt;
•our need and ability to raise additional capital in future debt or equity financings;
•our expectations regarding settlement of the Notes (as defined in Note 10, Convertible Senior Notes to the consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K);
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•our ability to comply with laws and regulations that currently apply or become applicable to our business both in the United States and internationally;
•beliefs about the impacts of legal and geopolitical developments upon our business;
•the attraction and retention of qualified employees and key personnel; and
•the future trading prices of our common stock.
These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including those described in "Risk Factors" elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment, and new risks emerge from time to time. It is not possible for our management to predict all risks, nor can we assess the impact of all factors on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements we may make. In light of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions, the forward-looking events and circumstances discussed in this Annual Report on Form 10-K may not occur and actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements and you should not place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements.
The forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K relate only to events as of the date on which the statements are made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.
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PART I
Item 1. Business
Overview
We anticipate, secure and simplify the experience of doing business, transforming today and tomorrow. We were incorporated in 2007, during the early stages of cloud adoption and mobility, based on a vision that the internet would become the new corporate network, as the cloud became the new data center. We predicted that with rapid cloud adoption and increasing workforce mobility, traditional perimeter security approaches would prove to be inadequate in protecting users and data and result in poor user experience. We pioneered a cloud platform, the Zscaler Zero Trust ExchangeTM platform, which represents a fundamental shift in the architectural design and approach to networking and security.
Enterprise applications are rapidly moving to the cloud to achieve greater IT agility, a faster pace of innovation and lower costs. Organizations are increasingly relying on internet destinations for a range of business activities, adopting new external software as a service, or SaaS, applications for critical business functions and moving their internally managed applications to the public cloud, infrastructure as a service, or IaaS, or platform as a service, or PaaS. Users now expect to be able to seamlessly access applications and data, wherever they are hosted, from any device, anywhere in the world. We believe these trends are indicative of the broader digital transformation agenda, as businesses increasingly succeed or fail based on their IT outcomes.
We believe that securing the corporate network is becoming increasingly irrelevant in a cloud and mobile-first world where organizations depend on the internet, a network they do not control and cannot secure, to access critical applications that power their businesses. We pioneered a unique approach that securely connects users, devices and applications using business policies, regardless of the network. Our Zero Trust Exchange platform eliminates the need for traditional on-premises security appliances that are difficult to maintain and require compromises between security, cost and user experience. Our purpose-built, multi-tenant, distributed cloud platform incorporates the security functionality needed to enable users, applications and devices to safely and efficiently utilize authorized applications and services based on an organization’s business policies.
Our cloud-native platform, the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, enables customers to secure and connect users, workloads and IoT/OT devices across three core products:
•Zscaler for Users — leverages our comprehensive cloud platform to provide users secure, fast and reliable access to the internet, including SaaS applications, via Zscaler Internet AccessTM, or ZIATM, and provides Zero Trust Network Access to internally hosted or managed applications via Zscaler Private AccessTM, or ZPATM, in each case, regardless of device, location or network and also regardless of whether the users are internal or external. Our unique ZPA technology not only provides secure access to applications, but also secures the applications themselves. We do this all while optimizing end-to-end user experience with Zscaler Digital ExperienceTM, or ZDXTM, which allows an organization to identify and isolate issues negatively impacting its users. In addition to enabling secure access to the internet and internal applications, our Zscaler Data ProtectionTM solution secures customers’ proprietary data that is traversing the public internet (data-in-motion) and data that is stored in the public cloud applications (data-at-rest).
•Zscaler for Workloads – leverages Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange to secure workloads, whether in a public cloud or in private data centers, using our cloud-native zero trust access service to provide fast and secure app-to-internet (via ZIA) and app-to-app (via ZPA) connectivity across multi- and hybrid cloud environments. Our Posture Control
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solutions automatically identify and remediate cloud service, application and identity misconfigurations for assets deployed in public cloud infrastructure. The core elements of Zscaler for Workloads address the key security and operations challenges that must be overcome to secure deployment of public cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, or Azure, Amazon Web Services, or AWS, and Google Cloud Platform, or GCP.
•Zscaler for IoT/OT – leverages the complete suite of Zscaler solutions to reduce the risk of cyberattacks and data loss as well as to improve user and facility safety by providing zero trust security for connected IoT and OT devices in branch offices. We provide secure internet communications for IoT and OT devices, privileged access to IoT and OT devices (e.g. for maintenance), secure access to production applications (e.g. on a factory floor) and deception technology to provide active defense.
Before our Zero Trust Exchange, the corporate data center served as the central hub of IT security, with a physical network perimeter used to separate corporate users, devices and applications from the internet. This traditional network perimeter approach relies on appliances that have become fundamentally less effective as applications, data, users and devices rapidly move off the corporate network, making the notion of a corporate perimeter obsolete. In a world where companies are shifting their most critical IT assets to the cloud, a zero trust architecture is required. Our architecture is vastly different from the legacy “hub-and-spoke” corporate network, where traffic from branch offices is routed to centralized data centers for security scanning and policy enforcement before reaching its destination. In contrast, our Zero Trust Exchange acts as an intelligent switchboard that uses business policies to securely connect users, devices and applications over any network and protect against cyberthreats and data loss. We provide our solutions at scale, processing over 500 billion internet transactions per day. Our Zero Trust Exchange eliminates the requirement for organizations to buy and manage a variety of high-cost appliances that need to be maintained by a large number of highly skilled security personnel, who are expensive and in increasingly short supply. We are integrating our proprietary large language models, or LLMs, with our Zero Trust Exchange to leverage our data lake built on our more than 500 billion daily transactions. Analyzing this volume of high-quality data can continuously improve our LLMs, artificial intelligence, or AI, and machine learning, or ML, models to deliver ever-more powerful security outcomes for our customers.
Our cloud native, multitenant architecture is distributed across more than 160 data centers globally which brings security and business policy close to users and devices in over 185 countries and provides fast, secure and reliable access. Each day, we block over 150 million threats and perform over 250,000 unique security updates. Our customers benefit from the cloud security effect of our ever-expanding ecosystem, enhanced by our advanced AI and ML capabilities, because once a new threat is detected, it can be blocked across our customer base within minutes.
Many of the largest enterprises and government agencies in the world rely on our solutions to help them accelerate their move to the cloud. We have over 8,650 customers across all major geographies, with an emphasis on larger organizations, and we currently count approximately 35% of the Forbes Global 2000 as customers. Our customers span every major industry, including financial services, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, automotive, airlines and transportation, conglomerates, consumer goods and retail, media and communications, public sector and education, energy, technology and telecommunications services.
We have experienced significant growth, with revenue increasing from $1,090.9 million in fiscal 2022 to $1,617.0 million in fiscal 2023 to $2,167.8 million in fiscal 2024, representing year-over-year revenue growth of 48% and 34%, respectively. We experienced net losses of $57.7 million, $202.3 million and $390.3 million in fiscal 2024, fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2022, respectively. We expect we will continue to incur net losses for the foreseeable future.
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Our Zero Trust Exchange Platform
Our Zero Trust Exchange cloud security platform delivers our core products; Zscaler for Users, Zscaler for Workloads and Zscaler for IoT/OT, through the deployment of our comprehensive and integrated solutions, each built natively in the cloud to power digital transformation.
Secure Internet and SaaS Access - Zscaler Internet Access
ZIA, provides users, workloads, IoT and OT devices secure access to externally managed applications, including SaaS applications and internet destinations regardless of device, location or network. ZIA provides inline content inspection and firewall access controls across all ports and protocols to protect organizations and users from external threats, secure data while at rest and prevent data from leaking out to unauthorized sites. Policies follow the user to provide identical protection on any device, regardless of location; any policy changes are enforced for users worldwide. Our cloud security platform provides full inline content inspection to assess and correlate the risk of the content to protect against sophisticated attacks, including ransomware and phishing. The cloud platform applies AI and ML across our over 500 billion daily transactions to quickly identify and block unknown threats and to identify and categorize unknown destinations.
ZIA enables the following capabilities:
Cyberthreat Protection – Our threat prevention functionality enables protection against threats using a range of approaches and techniques. Our threat prevention capabilities provide multiple layers of protection to prevent sophisticated ransomware, phishing and zero-day cyberattacks. We provide functionality that traditionally has been offered by disparate, stand-alone products. Our core cloud platform threat prevention services include:
•Advanced Threat Protection: Our advanced threat protection functionality uses techniques including AI/ML, signatures and reputation to deliver real-time protection from malicious internet content like browser exploits, scripts, zero-pixel iFrames, malware and botnet callbacks. Over 250,000 unique security updates are performed every day to the Zscaler cloud to keep users protected. Once we detect a new threat to a user, we block it for all users. We call this the “cloud security effect.”
•Sandbox: Our cloud sandbox enables enterprises to block zero-day exploits and advanced persistent threats by analyzing unknown files for malicious behavior, and it can scale to every user regardless of location. Our cloud sandbox was designed and built to be multi-tenant and allows customers, using AI among other analytics, to determine which traffic should be sent for detonation. As an integrated cloud security platform, customers can set policies by users and destinations to prevent patient-zero scenarios and to analyze, hold and detonate suspicious files in the cloud sandbox before they are sent to a user.
•Browser Isolation: Our cloud browser isolation functionality creates an isolated browsing session that enables users to access any webpage on the internet without downloading any of the web content served by the webpage onto a local device or the corporate network. With cloud browser isolation, users are not directly accessing active web content; instead, only a safe rendering of pixels is delivered to the user. Malicious code that may be hidden in the web content is kept at bay. Customers can select and isolate traffic based on specific policies and/or automatically based on our AI enabled risk determination. The combination of cloud browser isolation and cloud sandbox enables administrators to perform content disarm and reconstruction to flatten, sanitize and securely deliver files free of active content.
Data Protection – Our data protection functionality enables enterprises to prevent unauthorized sharing or exfiltration of confidential information across users, devices, servers and workloads, thereby reducing business and compliance risks for our customers. We provide inline monitoring of data flows between users and applications, workload to workload, API to
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API and applications to LLMs, reducing the risk of inadvertently transmitting sensitive data and intellectual property. Core cloud platform data protection services include:
•File Type Controls: Our AI-enabled data classification solution enables enterprise chief information officers to gain visibility of file types across all their IT environments. Our file type control functionality allows our customers to define policies to control which file types are allowed to be downloaded and uploaded based on application, user, location and destination.
•Advanced Data Classification: Our data classification engines leverage a variety of technologies and techniques to identify customer sensitive data. Predefined, custom dictionaries and automated AI discovery tools identify sensitive customer data by leveraging efficient pattern-matching algorithms, regular expressions, AI-based training models and keywords. Additional advanced classification techniques including exact data match, index document match and ML-based Optical Character Recognition functionalities, further identity sensitive data and enable our customers to populate their own custom databases scaling to billions of unique fields, including structured and unstructured documents.
•Data Loss Prevention: Our data loss prevention, or DLP, technology enables enterprises to alert and/or block transmission or sharing of sensitive data across exfiltration channels. This includes inline data in motion to external internet destinations and unmanaged endpoints, data at rest in SaaS environments through out-of-band API integrations, securing public cloud infrastructure data in Azure, AWS and GCP and protecting endpoints by preventing printing or copying to local storage, including USB devices. Additionally, our Email DLP solutions secure corporate email traffic, including Microsoft Exchange and Gmail.
•Unified SaaS Security: Our cloud access security broker, or CASB, SaaS security posture management and our SaaS supply chain security combine to discover and control known and unknown applications, identify SaaS misconfigurations, find and mitigate potentially risky third-party connections into those SaaS applications and scan data residing in those applications for threats and data protection violations. By doing transport layer security inspection at scale, we provide malware protection, data loss prevention and CASB functions that can be performed both inline and out-of-band, for specific sanctioned and unsanctioned applications. Business policies can be defined with granular access control for specified cloud applications, such as the ability to upload or download files or post comments on videos based on different user or group identity.
•Browser Isolation: With cloud browser isolation, users do not directly access active web content; instead, only a safe rendering of pixels is delivered to the user. This approach prevents sensitive data from being downloaded to unauthorized devices in bring-your-own-device environments, as well as offers an alternative to virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI, for employees, contractors and B2B partners, by effectively keeping sensitive data entirely within a managed environment.
Secure Local Internet Breakouts –Our local internet breakout capability means traffic destined for the cloud no longer needs to be routed over a private multiprotocol label switching, or MPLS, network to the data center. Traffic is now routed locally over the internet and directly to the cloud, providing for a faster experience and a significant reduction in MPLS network costs. Our core cloud platform services for local internet breakouts include:
•Firewall: Our cloud firewall was designed to protect users by inspecting internet traffic on all ports and protocols, and it offers user level policies, application identification with deep packet inspection and intrusion prevention.
•Bandwidth Control: Our bandwidth control and traffic shaping capabilities ensure that business critical applications are prioritized over non-business critical applications, improving productivity and user experience. By enforcing quality of service in the cloud, our platform enables the optimization of “last-mile” utilization of a customer’s network.
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•DNS: Our domain name system, or DNS, filtering solution provides a local DNS resolver and enforces acceptable use policies.
Secure Private Application Access - Zscaler Private Access
ZPA provides Zero Trust Network Access to secure access to internally managed applications, either hosted internally in data centers or hosted in private or public clouds. ZPA is designed around four key tenets that fundamentally change the way users access internal applications:
•connect users to applications without bringing users on the network;
•never expose applications to the internet;
•segment access to applications without relying on the traditional approach of network segmentation; and
•provide remote access over the internet without virtual private networks, or VPNs.
ZPA enforces a global policy engine that manages access to internally managed applications regardless of location. If access is granted to a user, our ZPA solution connects the user’s device only to the authorized application without exposing the identity or location of the application. As a result, applications are not exposed to the internet, further limiting the external attack surface. This results in reduced cost and complexity, while offering better security and an improved user experience.
Our ZPA solution includes broad functionality, which we categorize by the following areas:
•Cyberthreat Protection and Data Protection: Our ZPA solution delivers the same cyberthreat protection and data protection functionality that is applied to internet traffic via our ZIA solution.
•Secure Application Access: Since our ZPA solution delivers seamless connectivity to internally managed applications and assets whether they are in the cloud, enterprise data center or both, administrators can set global policies from a single console, enabling policy-driven access that is agnostic to the network the users are on. By creating seamless access to applications regardless of a user’s network, our ZPA solution eliminates the need for traditional remote access VPNs, reverse proxies and other similar products.
•Application Discovery: Similar to CASB application discovery reports for internet hosted SaaS applications, our ZPA solution provides granular discovery of internally managed applications to aid in the creation and oversight of segmentation policies. Because our ZPA solution sits on the application layer and is name-based or domain-based, organizations can quickly and seamlessly identify their internally-managed applications and then easily provision appropriate policies.
•Application Segmentation: Our architecture provides capabilities that enable user and application level segmentation, a vast improvement over traditional network segmentation. As each user-to-application connection is segmented with microtunnels, each of which is a temporary session between a specific user and a specific application, lateral movement across the network is prevented, significantly reducing security risk. Since users are granted access only to applications for which they have permission and are not granted full access to the network, microtunnels eliminate the need for an internal firewall.
•Application Protection: Our ZPA solution initiates outbound-only connections between authenticated users and internally managed applications using microtunnels. Access is provided to users without bringing them onto the corporate network and without exposing applications to the internet. Internally managed applications are not discoverable or identifiable. With no inbound connections and no public IP addresses, there is no inbound attack surface and therefore no threat of distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks. For allowed connections, our ZPA
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solution also provides Web Application Firewall functionality, including OWASP Top 10 protections for threats, such as Structured Query Language injection and cross-site scripting, to block common attack vectors.
•Reduce Attack Surface: Our architecture utilizes inside out connections that are outbound from users to the Zero Trust Exchange platform, which allows customers to deny all inbound connections. This reduces their attack surface by not exposing IP addresses of all devices, applications, appliances or workloads to the internet. Reduced attack surface results in lower exposure to zero-day application vulnerabilities and eliminates the need for DDoS mitigation.
•Browser Isolation: Our cloud browser isolation is used with our ZPA solution to provide isolated sessions to internal web applications without allowing data to transfer down to unmanaged devices or active content to be uploaded into sensitive internal applications. Combining cloud browser isolation with browser-based access provides a simplified, more cost-effective alternative to VDI for employees, contractors and B2B partners, by effectively keeping sensitive data off unmanaged devices.
The primary use cases for our ZPA solution include:
•remote workforce access to private applications without legacy VPN, providing zero trust from office to data center;
•deliver user-to-application segmentation, thus eliminating the risk of lateral threat propagation enabled by legacy Firewall and VPN based security architecture;
•providing non-employees with secure access to internal applications;
•securely connecting business-to-business, or B2B, customers, service providers and supplier access to applications typically deployed as business to business portals in an extranet;
•direct-to-cloud access to internally managed applications hosted in public cloud environments, such as Azure, AWS and GCP; and
•access to applications following a merger or acquisition by providing named users with access to named applications, without the need to merge networks.
Experience Management - Zscaler Digital Experience
ZDX is designed to measure end-to-end user experience across key business applications, providing an easy to understand digital experience score for each user, application and location within an enterprise. As users have become mobile and applications have moved to the cloud, traditional network performance monitoring tools have become increasingly irrelevant. Enterprises can no longer collect performance metrics or indicators along the traditional network path as they could when they owned the network and applications ran in their own data centers. When a user's experience is suffering or an event is negatively impacting user experience, ZDX utilizes AI-enabled root cause analysis to allow an organization to isolate where in the network path an issue is occurring and whether it is caused by a user’s device, the WiFi connection, the local internet connection, a service provider in the path or the destination application itself. With ZDX, enterprises can quickly determine if an issue is associated with a single user, application or location or indicates a broader issue potentially impacting other users, applications or locations all via a simple visual workflow without a need for additional hardware or software.
Zscaler Posture ControlTM – Cloud Applications and Workload Data Security
Zscaler data security posture management, or DPSM, extends our cloud security capabilities to protect data in public cloud environments. DSPM provides granular visibility into cloud data, classifies and identifies data and access and offers
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context around data exposure and security posture. This empowers organizations and security teams to prevent and remediate cloud data breaches at scale. The functionality leverages a unified DLP engine to ensure consistent data protection across all channels. Data classification is integrated with cloud security posture management, or CSPM, to understand data exposure and address cloud misconfigurations. The vulnerability management module enhances cloud risk assessment by identifying vulnerabilities in cloud workloads. Additionally, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, or CIEM, provides deep granularity into identity and privilege access management, ensuring that the right users and entities have access to the appropriate data. Zscaler DSPM ensures highly correlated alerts by combining these multiple modules to generate high-fidelity and actionable insights.
Zero Trust Networking
We believe that zero trust technology should not just be between remote users and the applications they use, but should be applied to all connectivity into and within an enterprise's environment. This connectivity includes workload-to-workload communication and IoT/OT-to-application, as most IoT and OT devices cannot load agents.
Our Zero Trust Networking solution includes broad functionality, which we categorize by the following ideas:
•Workload Segmentation. Our Workload Segmentation solution secures application-to-application communications inside public clouds and data centers to stop lateral threat movement, preventing application compromise and reducing the risk of data breaches. Our Workload Segmentation solution utilizes an innovative, AI-enabled approach that is simpler to deploy and operate than traditional segmentation solutions and improves the security of east-west communication by verifying the identity of the communicating application software, services and processes to achieve a zero trust environment. This reduces the attack surface, resulting in lower risk of application compromise and data breaches.
•Zero Trust SD-WAN. Our Zero Trust SD-WAN solution provides branches and data centers with fast, reliable access to the internet and private applications with our Direct-to-CloudTM architecture that provides strong security and operational simplicity, with the ability to deploy locally by virtual machine or by purchasing a plug-and-play appliance. Our Zero Trust SD-WAN solution eliminates lateral threat movement by connecting users and IoT/OT devices to applications through the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform. Branch traffic can be securely forwarded directly to the Zero Trust Exchange, where ZIA or ZPA policies can be applied for full security inspection and access identity-based control of branch and data center communications.
•Zero Trust Device Segmentation. Our Zero Trust Device Segmentation solution provides agentless segmentation for enterprise IT and OT environments, creating a "network of one" where even devices on the same network can only communicate with each other if authorized. The combination of Zero Trust SD-WAN with Zero Trust Device Segmentation extends the Zero Trust Exchange to protect east-west traffic in branch offices, campuses, factories and plants with critical OT infrastructure, eliminating the need for east-west firewalls, network access controls and traditional microsegmentation solutions, while simultaneously delivering operational simplicity.
Risk Management
Due to increased prioritization of cybersecurity and cyber risk at the executive and board of directors level, it is increasingly a top priority for organizations to drive a cyber risk quantification and holistic risk management strategy. By monitoring risk more systematically in their environment, organizations can drive broader cybersecurity strategies and remediation projects, including key cybersecurity architectural capabilities such as data protection, as well as risk-based asset and vulnerability management.
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Our Risk Management solutions include broad and differentiated functionality, which we categorize by the following areas:
•Risk 360. Zscaler Risk360 is a risk quantification and visualization framework for identifying cybersecurity risk across the stages of a potential cyber attack. It ingests data from external sources, Zscaler product sources and proprietary security research from our ThreatLabz team to generate a detailed profile of an enterprise’s risk posture. Zscaler Risk360 leverages over 100 factors within an enterprise’s cybersecurity environment to help customers estimate potential financial losses (derived from industry data), highlight top cyber risk drivers, recommend investigative workflows, show trends and peer comparisons and provide actionable information to be shared across the enterprise, including at the executive and board level.
•Deception. Our deception solution augments our customers' ability to detect the presence of an adversary in their network by deploying decoys andlures. These decoys can be leveraged to disrupt the adversary by detecting their presence in the network and initiating mitigation using automatic orchestration via the Zscaler platform and other third party solutions. Customers can quickly deploy these capabilities by leveraging a diverse library of built-in decoys including various types of applications, network components and IoT services. The high-fidelity low-volume alerts allow customers to implement meaningful automation workflows to prevent lateral spread.
•Unified Vulnerability Management. Our unified vulnerability management solution provides dynamic and customizable prioritization, streamlined reporting, zero-copy analytics and contextualized, risk-based assessment of a customer’s threat landscape. This solution is powered by our data fabric for security, added through our 2024 acquisition of Avalor Technologies, which utilizes more than 150 data connectors, built for all major security platforms, to ingest, normalize and unify data across enterprise security and business systems to deliver actionable insights, analytics and operational efficiencies. This enables our customers to significantly enhance and fully automate analytics and decision-making in real-time without the complexity of data aggregation and collection.
•Identity Protection. Attackers commonly target users and identities as the point of entry and use that access to escalate privileges and move laterally. Our Identity Protection capability provides continuous visibility into identity misconfigurations and at risk permissions by scanning common identity providers. Identity Protection augments this visibility with guidance in the form of scripts, commands and tutorials to remediate these issues and reduce customers’ internal attack surface. In addition to preventive capabilities, Identity Protection also provides high-fidelity detection for identity-based attacks like stolen credentials, multi-factor authentication bypasses and privilege escalation techniques that typically pass through existing defenses in cases of identity compromise.
Our Technology and Architecture
We are driven by technology and innovation. We developed a highly scalable, multi-tenant, globally distributed cloud capable of providing inline inspection of internet and SasS traffic, securing access to private applications, protecting cloud applications, managing digital experience and scanning for exposures and misconfigurations. We designed a purpose-built three-tier architecture starting with our core operating system and adding layers of security and networking innovations over time. Our cloud platform is protected by more than 580 issued and pending patents in the United States and other countries. Our cloud is distributed across more than 160 data centers on five continents and processes over 500 billion requests per day from users across over 185 countries.
Our platform is designed to be resilient, redundant and high-performing. It is built as software modules that run on standard x86 platforms without dependency on custom hardware. The platform modules are split into the control plane (Zscaler Central Authority), the enforcement plane (Zscaler Enforcement Nodes) and the logging and statistics plane (Zscaler Log Servers) as described below:
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•Zscaler Central Authority: The Zscaler Central Authority monitors our entire security cloud and provides a central location for software and database updates, policy and configuration settings and threat intelligence. The collection of Zscaler Central Authority instances together act like the brain of the cloud, and they are geographically distributed for redundancy and performance.
•Zscaler Enforcement Nodes: Customer traffic is directed to the nearest Zscaler Enforcement Node, where security, management and compliance policies served by the Zscaler Central Authority are enforced. The Zscaler Enforcement Node also incorporates our differentiated authentication and policy distribution mechanism that enables any user to connect to any Zscaler Enforcement Node at any time to ensure full policy enforcement. The Zscaler Enforcement Node utilizes a full proxy architecture and is built to ensure data is not written to disk to maintain the highest level of data security. Data is scanned in RAM only and then erased. Logs are continuously created in memory and forwarded to our logging module.
•Zscaler Log Servers: Our technology is built into the Zscaler Enforcement Node to perform lossless compression of logs, enabling our platform to collect over 130 terabytes of unique raw log data every day. We do not collect customer data other than logs, and those logs are encrypted and transmitted to our log server at a destination of choice selected by the customer without ever writing to disk at the enforcement nodes. Logs are transmitted to our logging servers over secure connections and multicast to multiple servers for redundancy. Our dashboards provide our customers visibility into their traffic to enable troubleshooting, policy changes and other administrative actions. Our analytics capabilities allow customers to interactively mine billions of transaction logs to generate reports that provide insight on network utilization and traffic. We do not rely on batch reporting; we continuously update our dashboards and reporting and can stream logs to a third-party security information and event management, or SIEM, service as they arrive. Regardless of where users are located, customers can choose to have logs stored in the United States or the European Union/Switzerland. Customer data is isolated as part of our multi-tenant architecture.
Our platform is a critical integration point positioned in the data path providing secure access to the internet, cloud and internal applications. We complement and interoperate with key technology and cloud vendors across major market segments, including identity and access management device and endpoint management, as well as SIEM for reporting and analytics. Many of these vendors, like us, were developed in the cloud and together provide a foundation for a modern access and security architecture.
Growth Strategies
The growing use of the internet and the increasing adoption of the cloud and mobility are driving network and application transformation. As a provider of a fully integrated, multi-tenant cloud security solution, we enable our customers to accelerate this secure transformation to the cloud and believe we are uniquely positioned to maximize value as they undertake these transitions. Key elements of our growth strategy include:
•Continue to win new customers. We believe that we have a significant opportunity to expand our customer base, both in the United States and internationally. We have invested significantly in our sales and marketing organization to execute against this opportunity.
•Expand in existing customers. We leverage a land-and-expand approach with our existing customers to sell subscriptions for additional users, additional solutions and premium solution bundles that contain more functionality.
•Leverage channel partners to participate in cloud transformation initiatives. We have invested in establishing long-standing relationships with global telecommunications service providers and are expanding our network of global system integrators and regional telecommunications service providers and cloud-centric value-added resellers and public cloud marketplaces.
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•Expansion and innovation of services. We continue to invest in research and development and acquire new technologies and products to add new and differentiated solutions to our existing product portfolio and to improve the overall functionality, reliability, availability and scalability of our cloud security platform.
•Expansion into additional market segments. We are targeting the expansion of our immediate addressable market into additional market verticals. For example, we are expanding into U.S. federal government agencies as well as into government agencies outside the U.S. We are also targeting our expansion into new geographies in the Asia Pacific and Latin America regions.
We sell to enterprises of all sizes. As of July 31, 2024, we had over 8,650 customers, including approximately 35% of the Forbes Global 2000. Many of our customers include major global enterprises that send virtually all of their internet traffic through our cloud security platform. Our customers operate in a variety of industries, including automotive, airlines and transportation, conglomerates, consumer goods and retail, energy, financial services, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, media and communications, public sector and education, technology and telecommunications services. Approximately 50% of our revenue was from customers outside the United States for all periods presented. No end customer contributed more than 10% of our revenue in fiscal 2024, fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2022.
Sales and Marketing
Although we have a channel sales model, we use a joint sales approach in which our sales force develops relationships directly with our customers, and together with our channel account teams, works with our channel partners on account penetration, account coordination, sales and overall market development. Our customer care and success teams maintain high-touch relationships with our customers to deploy and manage our cloud platform, identify, analyze and resolve performance issues and respond to security threats. We believe customer service touchpoints are opportunities to further develop our relationship with our customers and potentially generate incremental revenue through the addition of new users and services.
Our channel partners consist of global telecommunications service providers, system integrators, value-added reseller partners and public cloud marketplaces, and we leverage their relationships to expand our reach, improve procurement and accelerate customer fulfillment.
We enter into agreements with our channel partners in the ordinary course of business. The contracts typically have a one-year term and renew automatically, subject to cancellation by either party upon 90 days’ notice. These agreements contain standard commercial terms and conditions, including payment terms, billing frequency, warranties and indemnification. Our channel partners generally place purchase orders with us after receiving orders from customers. We generally maintain privity of contract with customers through end user subscription agreements.
We expect to continue investing in our channel partners as we provide them with education, training and programs, including supporting their independent sales of our solutions. We believe that such investment, and investments in our sales force, will lead to significant expansion in our customer base, which will materially impact our business and results of operations.
Our marketing strategy is focused on platform and brand awareness, which drives our opportunity pipeline and customer demand. This strategy is account-based, enabling us to pursue targeted marketing activities across both digital and non-digital channels. We anticipate increasing our marketing team headcount and are investing in programs designed to elevate our brand in the market and engage new enterprise accounts. We also participate in a number of cloud and security industry events. In addition, we have a deeply integrated ecosystem of channel partners, with whom we engage in joint marketing activities.
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Data Center Operations
We operate our services across more than 160 data centers around the world, which are built to be highly resilient, have multiple levels of redundancy and provide failover to other data centers in our network. Our data centers are co-located within top-tier internet interconnection hubs that have direct connectivity, known as peering, to major telecommunication service providers, SaaS providers, public cloud providers, internet content providers and popular internet destinations. A number of our data centers are also located with our service provider partners.
Compliance
Since successful completion of an initial independent third-party assessment in 2014, our platform has received numerous industry standard and internationally recognized certifications upon successful completion of further independent third-party assessments, including ISO 27001, ISO 27701, ISO 27018, ISO 27017, SOC2, CSA-STAR, HIPAA and NIST 800-63C.
We also built a leading U.S. and international government compliance portfolio. We are authorized at the FedRAMP High level and Impact Level 5 with the DOD for ZPA. In addition, in the U.S. we are authorized at both the FedRAMP Moderate and high levels for ZIA and ZPA. We also hold ITAR, FIPS, CJIS and VPAT 508 in our U.S. Government portfolio. We also became the first cloud-based SaaS security company to achieve StateRamp for state and local governments. Internationally, we are IRAP Protected and APRA in Australia, Cyber Essentials and G-Cloud in the UK, C5 in Germany, “in process” for ITSG-33 Prob B in Canada, ISMAP in Japan, MTCS in Singapore and, most recently, Spain Gov CPSTIC catalog listing and ENS-High.
Research and Development
Our research and development organization is responsible for the design, architecture, operation and quality of our cloud platform. In addition to improving on our features and functionality, this organization works closely with our cloud operations team to ensure that our platform is reliable, available and scalable. ThreatLabZ, our internal team of security experts, researchers and network engineers, analyzes the global threat landscape, works to eliminate threats across our cloud platform and reports on emerging security issues.
Research and development expense was $499.8 million, $349.7 million and $289.1 million for fiscal 2024, fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2022, respectively. Our research and development leadership team is predominantly located in San Jose, California, and we also maintain research and development centers internationally, including in India, Canada, Israel and Spain.
Competition
The market for security solutions is defined by changing technologies, an evolving threat landscape and complex enterprise needs. Our competitors and potential competitors include legacy on-premises appliance vendors and other vendors across a number of categories:
•independent IT security vendors, which offer a broad mix of network and endpoint security products;
•large networking and other vendors, which offer security appliances and/or incorporate security capabilities in their networking products and other services;
•companies with point solutions that compete with some of the features of our cloud platform, such as proxy, firewall, CASB, sandboxing and advanced threat protection, data loss prevention, encryption, load balancing and VPN; and
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•other providers of IT security services that offer, or may leverage related technologies to introduce, products that compete with or are alternatives to our cloud platform.
The principal competitive factors in the markets in which we operate include:
•delivering security from the cloud regardless of location of the user;
•platform features, effectiveness and extensibility;
•platform reliability, availability and scalability;
•rapid development and delivery of new capabilities and services;
•ability to integrate with other participants in the security and networking ecosystem;
•price, total cost of ownership and network cost savings;
•brand awareness, reputation and trust in the provider’s services;
•strength of sales, marketing and channel partner relationships; and
•quality of customer support.
We believe we are positioned favorably against our competitors based on these factors. Our cloud platform integrates many of the point products offered by our competitors and potential competitors, which is a key differentiator. However, many of our competitors have substantially greater financial, technical and other resources, greater brand recognition, larger sales forces and marketing budgets, broader distribution networks, more diverse product and services offerings and larger and more mature intellectual property portfolios. They may be able to leverage these resources to gain business in a manner that discourages users from purchasing our services, including through selling at zero or negative margins, offering concessions, product bundling or maintaining closed technology platforms. Further, many organizations have invested substantial personnel and financial resources to design and operate their appliance-based network security architecture and may not be willing or ready to abandon those historical investments. As our market grows and rapidly changes, we expect it will continue to attract new companies, including smaller emerging companies, which could introduce new products and services. In addition, we may expand into new markets and encounter additional competitors in such markets.
Intellectual Property
Our success depends in part upon our ability to protect and use our core technology and intellectual property rights. We rely on a combination of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secret laws, contractual provisions and confidentiality procedures to protect our intellectual property rights. As of July 31, 2024, we had more than 580 issued patents and pending patent applications, including more than 260 issued patents in the United States and other countries. Our issued patents expire between 2028 and 2043 and cover various aspects of our cloud platform. In addition, we have registered “Zscaler” as a trademark in the United States and other jurisdictions, and we have registered other trademarks and filed other trademark applications in the United States. We are also the registered holder of a variety of domestic and international domain names that include “Zscaler” and similar variations. In addition to the protection provided by our intellectual property rights, we enter into confidentiality and invention assignment or similar agreements with our employees, consultants and contractors. We further control the use of our proprietary technology and intellectual property rights through provisions in our subscription and license agreements. Despite our efforts to protect our trade secrets and proprietary rights through intellectual property rights, licenses and confidentiality agreements, unauthorized parties may still copy or otherwise obtain and use our software and technology. In addition to our internally developed technology, we also license software, including open source software, from third parties that we integrate into or bundle with our cloud platform.
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Our industry is characterized by the existence of a large number of patents and frequent claims and related litigation based on allegations of patent infringement or other violations of intellectual property rights. We believe that competitors will try to develop products and services that are similar to ours and that may infringe our intellectual property rights. Our competitors or other third-parties may also claim that our platform infringes their intellectual property rights. In particular, companies in our industry have extensive patent portfolios. From time to time, third parties, including certain of these companies and non-practicing entities, have in the past and may in the future, assert claims of infringement, misappropriation and other violations of intellectual property rights against us or our customers or channel partners, with whom our license or other agreements may obligate us to indemnify against these claims. Successful claims of infringement by a third-party could prevent us from offering certain services or features, require us to develop alternate, non-infringing technology, which could require significant time and during which we could be unable to continue to offer our affected subscriptions or services, require us to obtain a license, which may not be available on reasonable terms or at all, or force us to pay substantial damages, royalties or other fees. As we face increasing competition and gain an increasingly higher profile, the possibility of intellectual property rights claims against us grows. We cannot assure you that we do not currently infringe, or that we will not in the future infringe, upon any third-party patents or other proprietary rights. See “Risk Factors—Risks Related to Our Business—Claims by others that we infringe their proprietary technology or other rights, or other lawsuits asserted against us, could result in significant costs and substantially harm our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects” for additional information.
Government Regulation
Our business activities are subject to various federal, state, local and foreign laws, rules, and regulations. Compliance with these laws, rules and regulations has not had, and is not expected to have, a material effect on our capital expenditures, results of operations and competitive position as compared to prior periods. Nevertheless, compliance with existing or future governmental regulations, including, but not limited to, those pertaining to global trade, business acquisitions, consumer and data protection, privacy, employment, labor and taxes, could have a material impact on our business in subsequent periods. For more information on the potential impacts of government regulations affecting our business, see “Item 1A - Risk Factors.”
Human Capital
As of July 31, 2024, we had a total of 7,348 employees, including 4,595 employees located outside the United States, with the majority of non-U.S.-based employees located in India. None of our U.S.-based employees are represented by a labor union or covered by a collective bargaining agreement. We have not experienced any work stoppages and we consider our relations with our employees to be positive and collaborative.
Zscaler's vision is to create a world in which the exchange of information is always secure and seamless. Specifically, ensuring that our people and culture are aligned with this vision is critical to our success. In order to continue to innovate and to execute our business strategy, we must attract, develop and retain skilled employees, particularly in the areas of product development, engineering, sales and customer success.
We understand the importance of human capital so investing in our culture, employee development, compensation and benefits, and diversity and inclusion is essential.
Our Culture
Our culture is about creating an environment where our globally diverse workforce can contribute their best work to help our customers and our business succeed. Zscaler's cultural values are:
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•Teamwork
•Ownership
•Passion
•Innovation
•Customer Obsession
We build this culture through the feedback we receive from our employees through surveys as well as informal feedback channels throughout the year. We are proud to again be certified as a 2024 “Great Place to Work” in 11 countries, including the U.S. We ultimately view and measure the success of our culture by our ability to sustain great business results.
Employee Development
We invest in our employees through a suite of programs from their first day of employment to develop their talent and skills as our business grows. Our leadership approach establishes clear expectations, enables measurement and actionable feedback, and ensures that our people managers have access to learning and resources that help them to embody our leadership principles.
In addition, new employees in our customer care and success teams are enrolled in structured sales and product training to build their knowledge. Our technical teams have access to live and online training resources and participate in frequent company tech talks where training on best practices and latest developments are shared. We build the skills and capabilities of our senior leaders through intentional investment in their development and opportunities for them to network, collaborate and problem solve together.
To supplement our internal resources, we partner with external development organizations and tools. We partner with leading executive coaching organizations to offer focused development for key leaders, as well as targeted offerings on important topics. We offer tuition reimbursement for eligible employees to further enhance their career growth through higher education.
Compensation and Benefits
We provide competitive compensation and benefits packages to attract and retain our talent. In addition to base pay, employees may be eligible for annual bonuses that are tied to our financial performance and long-term equity incentives that vest subject to continued service. Certain employees may also need to achieve defined performance metrics for parts of their long-term incentives to vest. Our employee performance management program aligns individual achievement and corporate goal attainment with compensation. Employees are assessed on both what was achieved and how they achieved it to help build a high-performance culture that delivers for our customers and is aligned to our cultural values.
We offer an employee stock purchase plan, which allows employees to contribute a percentage of their wages to purchase our stock at a discount. In addition to cash and equity compensation, we offer our employees a robust portfolio of benefits, such as health, wellbeing, parental leave and retirement programs, to meet their individual and family needs.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging
We are committed to an inclusive culture. We strive to foster a workplace that promotes mutual respect, open and effective communication, and a sense of belonging for all employees. We ensure that our employees’ voices are heard and are always working on ways to improve their experience.
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We believe that a diversity of backgrounds, experiences and thinking contributes to creating a culture that enables innovation, execution and performance. At the end of fiscal 2024, women represented 23% of our global workforce in 29 countries and underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities represented 10% of our U.S.-based employees.
We have taken steps to address the diversity challenges that we face in the cybersecurity industry because we believe diverse representation and development of our talent enriches our industry. Our recruiters strive to build a diverse talent pipeline at the top of the hiring funnel, through proactive outreach to candidates from underrepresented groups.
Our People and Culture team partners with senior leadership to develop and advance our global diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging strategy. The company supports six employee resource groups that provide a safe community where employees can celebrate what makes them unique while also connecting with colleagues who share and embrace their identity.
To further support our efforts, we offer training on topics such as managing bias. We have invested in a cohort-based leadership program that builds the capabilities of the next generation of women leaders at Zscaler. Our foundational leadership programs emphasize the role of diversity in building high-performing teams.
Health, Safety and Wellbeing
The health and safety of our employees is our top priority. We recognize the need to create a flexible working environment that balances collaboration, innovation and connectivity with personal preferences for employees to do their best work. Our employee wellness program, Wellbeing at Z, supports employees across four pillars: physical, emotional, social and financial. The program is designed to meet the health needs of our employees through connection and support with flexibility for local and targeted needs. We will continue to review and invest in programs to provide for the health, safety and wellbeing of our employees.
Corporate Information
We were incorporated in the state of Delaware in September 2007 as SafeChannel, Inc., and in August 2008, we changed our name to Zscaler, Inc. Our principal executive offices are located at 120 Holger Way, San Jose, CA 95134, and our telephone number is (408) 533-0288. Our website address is www.zscaler.com. Information contained on, or that can be accessed through, our website does not constitute part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Available Information
Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, proxy statement, and all amendments to these filings, are available free of charge from our investor relations website (https://ir.zscaler.com/financial-information/sec-filings) as soon as reasonably practicable following our filing with or furnishing to the SEC of any of these reports. The SEC’s website (https://www.sec.gov) contains reports, proxy and information statements and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC.
Zscaler investors and others should note that we announce material information to the public about our company, products and services and other issues through a variety of means, including our website (https://www.zscaler.com), our investor relations website (https://ir.zscaler.com), our blogs (https://www.zscaler.com/blogs), press releases, SEC filings, public conference calls and social media, in order to achieve broad, non-exclusionary distribution of information to the public. We encourage our investors and others to review the information we make public in these locations as such information could be deemed to be material information. Please note that this list may be updated from time to time.
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The contents of any website referred to in this Form 10-K are not intended to be incorporated into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file.
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Item 1A. Risk Factors
A description of the risks and uncertainties associated with our business is set forth below. You should carefully consider the risks and uncertainties described below, as well as the other information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including the consolidated financial statements and the related notes and "Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations." The occurrence of any of the events or developments described below, or of additional risks and uncertainties not presently known to us or that we currently deem immaterial, could materially and adversely affect our business, results of operations, financial condition and growth prospects. In such an event, the market price of our common stock could decline, and you could lose all or part of your investment.
Summary of Risk Factors
Investing in our common stock involves a high degree of risk because our business is subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, as more fully described in this section below this summary. The principal factors and uncertainties that make investing in our common stock risky include, among others:
•we have a history of annual net losses and may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future;
•if organizations do not adopt our cloud platform, our ability to grow our business and operating results may be adversely affected;
•if we are unable to attract new customers or our customers do not renew their subscriptions for our services and add additional users and services to their subscriptions, our future results of operations could be harmed;
•we face intense and increasing competition and could lose market share to our competitors;
•we have experienced rapid revenue and other growth in recent periods, which may not be indicative of our future performance;
•our operating results may fluctuate significantly, which could make our future results difficult to predict and could cause our operating results to fall below expectations;
•if the delivery of our services to our customers is interrupted or delayed for any reason, our business would suffer;
•the actual or perceived failure of our cloud platform to block malware or prevent a security breach or incident could harm our reputation and adversely impact our business;
•our business and growth depend in part on the success of our relationships with our channel partners;
•if our cloud platform or internal networks, systems or data are or are perceived to have been breached, our solution may be perceived as insecure, our reputation may be damaged and our financial results may be negatively impacted;
•we rely on our key technical, sales and management personnel to grow our business, and the loss of one or more key employees or the inability to attract and retain qualified personnel could harm our business;
•claims by others that we infringe their proprietary technology or other rights, or other lawsuits asserted against us, could result in significant costs and substantially harm our business;
•if we are unable to effectively manage certain risks and challenges related to our India operations, our business could be harmed;
•servicing our debt may require a significant amount of cash, and we may not have sufficient cash flow from our business or the ability to raise funds to pay our substantial debt; and
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•the impact of global economic disruptions, including as a result of geopolitical uncertainty and instability, inflation, global health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and governmental responses thereto, remains uncertain and may have a material adverse impact on our business.
Risks Related to Our Business
Risks Related to Our Growth
We have a history of annual net losses and may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future.
We have incurred net losses in all annual periods since our inception, and we expect we will continue to incur annual net losses for the foreseeable future. We experienced net losses of $57.7 million, $202.3 million and $390.3 million for fiscal 2024, fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2022, respectively. As of July 31, 2024, we had an accumulated deficit of $1,148.1 million. Because the market for our cloud platform is rapidly evolving and cloud-based security solutions have not yet reached widespread adoption, it is difficult for us to predict our future results of operations. We expect our operating expenses to increase significantly over the next several years as we continue to hire additional personnel, particularly in research and development and sales and marketing, expand our operations and infrastructure, both domestically and internationally, and continue to develop our platform. If we fail to increase our revenue to offset the increases in our operating expenses, we may not achieve or sustain profitability in the future.
Additionally, our business strategy continues to focus primarily on long-term growth. As we execute on this strategy, we may ultimately be unable to achieve or sustain profitability at the level contemplated by industry or financial analysts and our stockholders, and as a result, our stock price may decline.
If organizations do not adopt our cloud platform, our ability to grow our business and operating results may be adversely affected.
Cloud security technologies are still evolving, and it remains difficult to predict customer demand and adoption rates for our solutions. We believe that our cloud platform offers superior protection to our customers, who are becoming increasingly dependent on the internet as they move their applications and data to the cloud. We also believe that our cloud platform represents a major shift from on-premises appliance-based security solutions. While cloud-based security solutions have seen increased adoption, traditional on-premises security appliances continue to be entrenched in the infrastructure of many of our potential customers, particularly large enterprises, because of their prior investment in and the familiarity of their IT personnel with on-premises appliance-based solutions. As a result, our sales process often involves extensive efforts to educate our customers on the benefits and capabilities of our cloud platform, particularly as we continue to pursue customer relationships with large organizations. Even with these efforts, we cannot predict long-term market acceptance of our cloud platform, or the adoption of competing products, services or technologies. If we fail to achieve broad market acceptance of our cloud platform or are unable to keep pace with industry changes, our ability to grow our business and our operating results will be materially and adversely affected.
If we are unable to attract new customers, our future results of operations could be harmed.
To increase our revenue and achieve and maintain profitability, we must add new customers. To add new customers, we must successfully convince IT decision makers that security delivered through our cloud platform provides significant advantages over legacy on-premises appliance-based security products and competing cloud-based products. Additionally, many of our customers broadly deploy our products, which requires a significant commitment of resources from our customers. These factors significantly impact our ability to add new customers and increase the time, resources and sophistication required to do so.
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In addition, numerous other factors, many of which are out of our control, have impacted and may in the future impact our ability to add new customers, including potential customers’ commitments to legacy IT security vendors and products, real or perceived switching costs, competition from hybrid or cloud security products, our failure to expand, retain and motivate our sales and marketing personnel, our failure to develop or expand relationships with our channel partners or to attract new channel partners, failure by us or our partners to help our customers to successfully deploy our cloud platform, negative media or industry or financial analyst commentary regarding us or our solutions, or similar solutions offered by other vendors, litigation and general economic conditions. As a result of challenging macroeconomic conditions, we have experienced and may experience in the future increased scrutiny and a longer approval process for initial purchases by new customers, particularly for larger transactions. We cannot predict how long these challenging macroeconomic conditions will persist, and customer cautiousness could continue or worsen or result in potential customers deciding to forego our services entirely.
If our efforts to attract new customers are not successful, our revenue and rate of revenue growth may decline, we may not achieve profitability and our future results of operations could be materially harmed.
If our customers do not renew their subscriptions for our services and add additional users and services to their subscriptions, our future results of operations could be harmed.
In order for us to maintain or improve our results of operations, it is important that our customers renew their subscriptions for our services when existing contract terms expire, and that we expand our commercial relationships with our existing customers. Our customers have no obligation to renew their subscriptions for our services after the expiration of their contractual subscription period, which is typically one to three years, and in the normal course of business, some customers have elected not to renew. In addition, in certain cases, customers may cancel their subscriptions without cause either at any time or upon advance written notice (commonly ranging from 30 days to 60 days), typically subject to an early termination penalty for unused services. In addition, our customers may renew for fewer users, renew for shorter contract lengths or switch to a lower-cost product suite. If our customers do not renew their subscription services, we could incur impairment losses related to our deferred contract acquisition costs. It is difficult to accurately predict long-term customer retention because of our varied customer base and given the length of our subscription contracts. Our customer retention and expansion may decline or fluctuate as a result of a number of factors, including our customers’ satisfaction with our services, our prices and pricing plans, our customers’ spending levels, decreases in the number of users to which our customers deploy our solutions, mergers and acquisitions involving our customers, competition and deteriorating general economic conditions, which may result in reductions in IT budgets and lower employee headcounts.
Our future success also depends in part on the rate at which our current customers add additional users or services to their subscriptions, which is driven by a number of factors, including customer satisfaction with our services, customer security and networking issues and requirements, general economic conditions and customer reaction to the price per additional user or of additional services. If our efforts to expand our relationship with our existing customers are not successful, our business may materially suffer.
We have experienced rapid revenue and other growth in recent periods, which may not be indicative of our future performance.
We have experienced rapid growth in revenue, operations and employee headcount in recent periods. In addition, the number of customers, users and internet traffic on our cloud platform has increased rapidly in recent years. Our growth may not be sustainable and may not be sufficient to achieve and sustain profitability, as we also expect our costs to increase in future periods as we expand our operations and significantly increase our headcount. In addition, we expect our recent revenue growth rates will decline in the future as the size of our revenue base increases. As a result, we believe that historical comparisons of our revenue may not be meaningful and should not be relied upon as an indication of future performance.
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Accordingly, you should not rely on our revenue and other growth for any prior quarter or fiscal year as an indication of our future revenue or revenue growth.
If we fail to effectively manage our growth, we may be unable to execute our business plan, maintain high levels of service, adequately address competitive challenges or maintain our corporate culture, and our business, financial condition and results of operations would be harmed.
Our growth has placed, and future growth will continue to place, a significant strain on our management and our administrative, operational and financial infrastructure. Our success will depend in part on our ability to manage this growth effectively, which will require that we continue to improve our administrative, operational, financial and management systems and controls by, among other things:
•effectively attracting, retaining, training and integrating, including collaborating with, a large number of new employees;
•further improving our key business applications, processes and IT infrastructure, including our data centers, to support our business needs;
•enhancing our information and communication systems to ensure that our employees and offices around the world are well coordinated and can effectively communicate with each other and our growing base of channel partners, customers and users; and
•appropriately documenting and testing our IT systems and business processes.
These and other improvements in our systems and controls will require significant capital expenditures and the allocation of valuable management and employee resources. If we fail to implement these improvements effectively, our ability to manage our expected growth, ensure uninterrupted operation of our cloud platform and key business systems and comply with the rules and regulations applicable to public companies could be impaired, the quality of our platform and services could suffer and we may not be able to adequately address competitive challenges.
In addition, we believe that our corporate culture has been a contributor to our success, which we believe fosters innovation, teamwork and an emphasis on customer-focused results. We also believe that our culture creates an environment that drives and perpetuates our strategy and cost-effective distribution approach. In the past we have, and in the future we may, restructure or reduce our workforce to align people, roles and projects to our strategic priorities. Any restructuring, reduction or realignment in the workforce has the potential to negatively impact employee morale or make it more difficult to attract and retain talent. As we continue to grow, we may find it difficult to maintain our corporate culture. Preservation of our corporate culture is also made more difficult following the implementation of our hybrid work environment, and many of our employees continue to work from home on a full time or part time basis. Any failure to preserve our culture could harm our future success, including our ability to retain and recruit personnel, innovate and operate effectively and execute on our business strategy. If we experience any of these effects in connection with future growth, it could materially impair our ability to attract new customers, support and retain existing customers and expand their use of our platform, all of which would materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.
Our operating results may fluctuate significantly, which could make our future results difficult to predict and could cause our operating results to fall below expectations.
Our operating results may fluctuate from quarter to quarter as a result of a number of factors, many of which are outside of our control and may be difficult to predict. Some of the factors that may cause our results of operations to fluctuate from quarter to quarter include:
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•broad market acceptance and the level of demand for our cloud platform;
•our ability to attract new customers, particularly large enterprises;
•our ability to retain customers and expand their usage of our platform, particularly our largest customers;
•our ability to successfully expand internationally and penetrate key markets;
•the effectiveness of our sales and marketing programs;
•the length of our sales cycle;
•the timing and availability of renewals;
•technological changes and the timing and success of new service introductions by us or our competitors or any other change in the competitive landscape of our market;
•increases in and timing of operating expenses that we may incur to grow and expand our operations and to remain competitive;
•pricing pressure as a result of competition or otherwise;
•seasonal buying patterns for IT spending, including the possible slowdown in IT spending due to the recent global economic downturn;
•the quality and level of our execution of our business strategy and operating plan;
•reputational harm as a result of actual, perceived or purported technological failure or disruption;
•adverse litigation judgments, settlements or other litigation-related costs;
•changes in the legislative or regulatory environment;
•the impact and costs related to the acquisition of businesses, talent, technologies or intellectual property rights;
•fluctuations in currency exchange rates and changes in the proportion of our revenue and expenses denominated in foreign currencies;
•changes in U.S. generally accepted accounting principles; and
•general economic conditions in either domestic or international markets, including as a result of geopolitical uncertainty and instability (such as the current conflicts between Russia and Ukraine and in the Middle East), global health crises and pandemics such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and governmental responses thereto.
Any one or more of the factors above may result in significant fluctuations in our results of operations. We also intend to continue to invest significantly to grow our business in the near future rather than optimizing for profitability or cash flows. In addition, we generally experience seasonality in terms of when we enter into agreements with customers. We typically enter into a higher percentage of agreements with new customers, as well as renewal agreements with existing customers, in the second half of our fiscal year. This seasonality is reflected to a much lesser extent, and sometimes is not immediately apparent, in revenue, due to the fact that we recognize subscription revenue ratably over the term of the subscription, which is generally one to three years. We expect that seasonality will continue to affect our operating results in the future and may reduce our ability to predict cash flow and optimize the timing of our operating expenses.
The variability and unpredictability of our quarterly results of operations or other operating metrics could result in our failure to meet our expectations or those of industry or financial analysts. If we fail to meet or exceed such expectations for
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these or any other reasons, the market price of our common stock could fall substantially, and we could face costly lawsuits, including securities class action suits.
Our business and growth depend in part on the success of our relationships with our channel partners.
We currently derive most of our revenue from sales through our channel partner network, and we expect for the foreseeable future most of our future revenue growth will also be driven through this network. Not only does our joint sales approach require additional investment to grow and train our sales force, but we believe that continued growth in our business is dependent upon identifying, developing and maintaining strategic relationships with our existing and potential channel partners, including global systems integrators and regional telecommunications service providers that will in turn drive substantial revenue and provide additional value-added services to our customers. Our agreements with our channel partners are generally non-exclusive, meaning our channel partners may offer customers the products of several different companies, including products that compete with our cloud platform. Our channel partners may also cease marketing or reselling our platform with limited or no notice and without penalty. If our channel partners do not effectively market and sell subscriptions to our cloud platform, choose to promote our competitors’ products or fail to meet the needs of our customers, our ability to grow our business and sell subscriptions to our cloud platform may be adversely affected. For example, sales through our top five channel partners and their affiliates, in aggregate, represented 25% of our revenue for fiscal 2024, 26% of our revenue for fiscal 2023 and 28% of our revenue for fiscal 2022. In addition, our channel partner structure could subject us to lawsuits or reputational harm if, for example, a channel partner misrepresents the functionality of our cloud platform to customers or violates applicable laws or our corporate policies. Moreover, our channel partners' operations may be negatively impacted by events including pandemics, international conflicts, inflation and other events affecting the global economy in general. For example, these events could increase credit risk of end customers and create uncertainty in credit markets. Our ability to achieve revenue growth in the future will depend in large part on our success in maintaining successful relationships with our channel partners, identifying additional channel partners and training our channel partners to independently sell and deploy our platform. If we are unable to maintain our relationships with our existing channel partners or develop successful relationships with new channel partners or if our channel partners fail to perform, our business, financial position and results of operations could be materially and adversely affected.
Risks Related to Our Products and Services
We face intense and increasing competition and could lose market share to our competitors, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.
The market for network security solutions is intensely competitive and characterized by rapid changes in technology, customer requirements, industry standards and frequent introductions of new products and services and improvements of existing products and services. Our business model of delivering security through the cloud rather than legacy on-premises appliances, while gaining increasing support, has not yet achieved widespread market adoption. Moreover, we compete with many established network and security vendors who are aggressively competing against us with their legacy appliance-based solutions and have also introduced cloud-based services that purport to have functionality similar to our cloud platform. We are experiencing increased competition as other established and emerging companies enter the cloud-based security solutions market and introduce new products, services and technologies to address evolving customer requirements. If we are unable to anticipate or effectively react to these competitive challenges, our competitive position could weaken, and we could experience a decline in revenue or our growth rate that could materially and adversely affect our business and results of operations.
Our competitors and potential competitors include:
•independent IT security vendors, which offer a broad mix of network and endpoint security products;
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•large networking and other vendors, which offer security appliances and/or incorporate security capabilities in their networking products and other services;
•companies with point solutions that compete with some of the features of our cloud platform, such as proxy, firewall, CASB, sandboxing and advanced threat protection, data loss prevention, encryption, load balancing and VPN; and
•other providers of IT security services that offer, or may leverage related technologies to introduce, products that compete with or are alternatives to our cloud platform.
Many of our existing competitors have, and some of our potential competitors could have, substantial competitive advantages such as:
•greater name recognition, longer operating histories and larger customer bases;
•larger sales and marketing budgets and resources;
•broader distribution and established relationships with channel partners and customers;
•greater customer support resources;
•greater resources to make acquisitions and enter into strategic partnerships;
•lower labor and research and development costs;
•larger and more mature intellectual property rights portfolios; and
•substantially greater financial, technical and other resources.
Our competitors may be successful in convincing IT decision makers that legacy appliance-based security products or hybrid security cloud solutions based on legacy technology are sufficient to meet their security needs and provide security performance that competes with our cloud platform. In addition, our competitors have and may develop cloud-based solutions with architectures similar to our products. Further, many organizations have invested substantial personnel and financial resources to design and operate their appliance-based networks and have established deep relationships with appliance vendors. As a result, these organizations may prefer to purchase from their existing suppliers rather than add or switch to a new supplier.
Our larger competitors have substantially broader and more diverse product and services offerings, which may allow them to leverage their relationships based on other products or incorporate functionality into existing products to gain business in a manner that discourages users from purchasing our services, including through selling at zero or negative margins, offering free services and other concessions, bundling products or maintaining closed technology platforms. Many competitors that specialize in providing protection from a single type of security threat may be able to deliver these targeted security products to the market more quickly than we can or to convince organizations that these limited products meet their needs.
Conditions in our market change rapidly and significantly as a result of technological advancements, partnering or acquisitions by our competitors or continuing market consolidation. Start-up companies that innovate and large competitors that are making significant investments in research and development may introduce similar or superior products, services and technologies that compete with our cloud platform. In addition, large companies with substantial communications infrastructure, such as global telecommunications services provider partners or public cloud providers, have entered or could choose to enter the security solutions market. Some of our current or potential competitors have made or could make acquisitions of businesses or establish cooperative relationships that may allow them to offer more directly competitive and comprehensive solutions than were previously offered and adapt more quickly to new technologies and customer needs.
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These competitive pressures in our market or our failure to compete effectively may result in price reductions, fewer orders, reduced revenue and gross margins, increased net losses and loss of market share. Any failure to meet and address these factors could materially harm our business and operating results.
If the delivery of our services to our customers is interrupted or delayed for any reason, our business would suffer.
Any interruption or delay in the delivery of our services will negatively impact our customers. Our solutions enable secure connections to cloud-based applications and other destinations via the internet, by directing our customers’ internet traffic through our cloud platform. Our customers depend on the continuous availability of our cloud platform to access the internet, and our services are designed to operate without interruption in accordance with our service level commitments. However, our platform is complex and may contain defects or errors that are not detected until after deployment. If we fail to timely detect defects or errors before deployment, or if our entire platform were to fail, customers and users could lose access to critical services and applications until such disruption is resolved or customers deploy our disaster recovery solution that allows them to bypass our cloud platform to access the internet. The adverse effects of any service interruptions on our reputation and financial condition may be disproportionately heightened due to the nature of our business and the fact that our customers expect continuous and uninterrupted internet access and have a low tolerance for interruptions of any duration. While we do not consider them to have been material, we have experienced, and may in the future experience, service disruptions and other performance problems due to a variety of factors.
The following factors, many of which are beyond our control, can affect the delivery and availability of our services and the performance of our cloud:
•the development and maintenance of the infrastructure of the internet;
•the performance and availability of third-party telecommunications services with the necessary speed, data capacity and security for providing reliable internet access and services;
•decisions by the owners and operators of the data centers where our cloud infrastructure is deployed or by global telecommunications service provider partners who provide us with network bandwidth to terminate our contracts, discontinue services to us, shut down operations or facilities, increase prices, change service levels, limit bandwidth, declare bankruptcy or prioritize the traffic of other parties;
•the occurrence of earthquakes, floods, fires, pandemics, power loss, system failures, physical or electronic break-ins, acts of war, international conflicts (such as the current conflicts between Russia and Ukraine and in the Middle East) or terrorism, human error or interference (including by disgruntled employees, former employees or contractors) and other catastrophic events;
•cyberattacks, including denial of service attacks, targeted at us, our data centers, our global telecommunications service provider partners or the infrastructure of the internet;
•government action to limit access to the internet;
•failure by us to maintain and update our cloud infrastructure to meet our traffic capacity requirements;
•errors, defects or performance problems in our software, including those potentially introduced by our software updates and third-party software incorporated in our software, which we use to operate our cloud platform;
•improper classification of websites by our vendors who provide us with lists of malicious websites;
•improper deployment or configuration of our services by our customers;
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•the failure of our redundancy systems, in the event of a service disruption at one of our data centers, to provide failover to other data centers in our data center network; and
•the failure of our disaster recovery and business continuity arrangements.
The occurrence of any of these factors, or if we are unable to efficiently and cost-effectively fix such errors or other problems that may be identified, could damage our reputation, negatively impact our relationship with our customers or otherwise materially harm our business, results of operations and financial condition.
In addition, we provide our services through a cloud-based inline proxy, and some governments, third-party products, websites or services may block proxy-based traffic under certain circumstances. For example, vendors may attempt to block traffic from our cloud platform or blacklist our IP addresses because they cannot identify the source of the proxy-based traffic. Our competitors may use this as an excuse to block traffic from their solutions or blacklist our IP addresses, which may result in our customers’ traffic being blocked from our platform. If our customers experience significant instances of traffic blockages, they will experience reduced functionality or other inefficiencies, which would reduce customer satisfaction with our services and likelihood of renewal.
If we fail to develop or introduce new enhancements to our cloud platform on a timely basis, our ability to attract and retain customers, remain competitive and grow our business could be impaired.
The industry in which we compete is characterized by rapid technological change, frequent introductions of new products and services, evolving industry standards and changing regulations, as well as changing customer needs, requirements and preferences. Our ability to attract new customers and increase revenue from existing customers will depend in significant part on our ability to anticipate and respond effectively to these changes on a timely basis and continue to introduce enhancements to our cloud platform. For example, advancements in technology, such as AI and ML, are changing the way our industry identifies and responds to cyber threats, and businesses that are slow to adopt or fail to adopt these new technologies may face a competitive disadvantage. The success of our cloud platform depends on our continued investment in our research and development organization to increase the reliability, availability and scalability of our existing solutions. The success of any enhancement depends on several factors, including the timely completion and market acceptance of the enhancement. Any new service that we develop or acquire might not be introduced in a timely or cost-effective manner and might not achieve the broad market acceptance necessary to generate significant revenue. If new technologies emerge that deliver competitive products and services at lower prices, more efficiently, more conveniently or more securely, these technologies could adversely impact our ability to compete effectively. Any delay or failure in the introduction of enhancements could materially harm our business, results of operations and financial condition.
If our global network of data centers, which deliver our services, was damaged or otherwise failed to meet the requirements of our business, our ability to provide services to our customers and maintain the performance of our cloud platform could be negatively impacted, which could cause our business to suffer.
We currently host our cloud platform and serve our customers from a global network of over 160 data centers. While we have electronic access to the components and infrastructure of our cloud platform that are hosted by third parties, we do not control the operation of these facilities. Consequently, we may be subject to service disruptions as well as a lack of adequate support for our data center operations due to reasons that are outside of our direct control. Our data centers are vulnerable to damage and connections to our data centers may be interrupted by a variety of sources, including earthquakes, floods, fires, power loss, system or infrastructure failures, computer viruses, physical or electronic break-ins, human error or interference (including by disgruntled employees, former employees or contractors) and other catastrophic events, including those exacerbated by the effects of climate change. Our data centers may also be subject to national or local administrative actions, changes in government regulations, including, for example, the impact of global economic and other sanctions like those levied in response to the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, changes to legal or permitting requirements and
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litigation to stop, limit or delay operations. Despite precautions taken at these facilities, such as disaster recovery and business continuity arrangements, the occurrence of a natural disaster or an act of terrorism, a decision to close the facilities without adequate notice or other unanticipated problems at these facilities could result in interruptions or delays in our services, impede our ability to scale our operations or have other adverse impacts upon our business. In addition, if we do not accurately plan for our infrastructure capacity requirements or experience significant strains on our data center capacity, we may experience delays and additional expenses in arranging new data centers, and our customers could experience performance degradation or service outages that may subject us to financial liabilities, result in customer losses and materially harm our business. For example, to manage a dramatic increase in ZPA traffic resulting from our customers' employees working from home at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we temporarily increased our use of public cloud infrastructure, which is substantially more expensive than our own data centers. If we must again materially increase our use of public cloud infrastructure in the future, our results of operations could be negatively impacted.
If our cloud platform or internal networks, systems or data are or are perceived to have been breached, our solution may be perceived as insecure, our reputation may be damaged and our financial results may be negatively impacted.
It is virtually impossible for us to entirely mitigate the risk of breaches of our cloud platform or other security incidents affecting our cloud platform or our internal systems, networks or data. In addition, the functionality of our platform may be disrupted, either intentionally or due to negligence, by third parties, including disgruntled employees or contractors and other current or former employees or contractors. The security measures we use internally and have integrated into our cloud platform, which are designed to detect unauthorized activity and prevent or minimize security breaches, may not function as expected or may not be sufficient to identify or protect against certain attacks. Enterprises are subject to a wide variety of attacks on their networks and systems, and techniques used to sabotage or to obtain unauthorized access to networks in which data is stored or through which data is transmitted change frequently and generally are not recognized until launched against a target. The growth in state sponsored cyber activity, including those actions taken in connection with the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, showcase the increasing sophistication of cyber threats. As a result, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques or implement adequate measures to prevent an electronic intrusion into our customers through our cloud platform or to prevent breaches and other security incidents affecting our cloud platform, internal networks, systems or data. Further, once identified, we may be unable to remediate or otherwise respond to a breach or other incident in a timely manner. Actual, perceived or purported security breaches of our cloud platform could result in actual, perceived or purported breaches of our customers’ networks and systems.
Our internal systems are exposed to the same cybersecurity risks and consequences of a breach as our customers and other enterprises. However, since our business is focused on providing reliable security services to our customers, we believe that an actual, perceived or purported breach of, or security incident affecting, our internal networks, systems or data, could be especially detrimental to our reputation, customer confidence in our solution and our business. Additionally, many of our personnel work remotely on a hybrid or permanent basis, which may pose additional data security risks.
Further, our vendors and service providers may also be the targets of cyberattacks, and their systems and networks may be, or may have been, breached or contain exploitable defects or bugs that could result in a breach of or disruption to their or our systems and networks. Our ability to monitor our vendors’ and service providers’ data security is limited, and, in any event, third parties may be able to circumvent their security measures, resulting in the unauthorized access to, misuse, disclosure, loss, alteration, or destruction of our data, including confidential, sensitive, and other information about individuals. Geo-political factors including international conflicts, such as between Russia and Ukraine and in the Middle East, may increase the risk of such cyberattacks.
Any actual, perceived or purported security breaches or other security incidents that we suffer with regard to our platform, systems, networks or data, including any such actual, perceived or purported security breaches or security incidents
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that result, or are believed to result, in actual, perceived or purported breaches of our customers’ networks or systems, could result in:
•the expenditure of significant financial resources in efforts to analyze, correct, eliminate, remediate or work around errors or defects, to address and eliminate vulnerabilities and to address any applicable legal or contractual obligations relating to any actual, perceived or purported security breach or other security incident;
•negative publicity and damage to our reputation, brand, and market position;
•harm to our relationships with, and a loss of, existing or potential customers or channel partners;
•delayed or lost sales and harm to our financial condition and results of operations;
•a delay in attaining, or the failure to attain, market acceptance; and
•legal claims and demands (including for stolen assets or information, repair of system damages and compensation to customers, customers of customers and business partners), litigation (including stockholder claims), regulatory inquiries or investigations and other liability.
Any of the above could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.
While we maintain insurance, our insurance may be insufficient to cover all liabilities incurred in relation to actual, perceived or purported security breaches or other security incidents. We also cannot be certain that our insurance coverage will be adequate for liabilities actually incurred, that insurance will continue to be available to us on economically reasonable terms, or at all, or that any insurer will not deny coverage as to any future claim. The successful assertion of one or more large claims against us that exceed available insurance coverage, or the occurrence of changes in our insurance policies, including premium increases or the imposition of large deductible or co-insurance requirements, could have a material adverse effect on our business, including our financial condition, operating results and reputation.
If our cloud platform does not interoperate with our customers’ network and security infrastructure or with third-party products, websites or services, our cloud platform may become less competitive and our results of operations may be harmed.
Our cloud platform must interoperate with our customers’ existing network and security infrastructure. These complex systems are developed, delivered and maintained by the customer and a myriad of vendors and service providers. As a result, the components of our customers’ infrastructure have different specifications, rapidly evolve, utilize multiple protocol standards, include multiple versions and generations of products and may be highly customized. We must be able to interoperate and provide our security services to customers with highly complex and customized networks, which requires careful planning and execution between our customers, our customer support teams and our channel partners. Further, when new or updated elements of our customers’ infrastructure or new industry standards or protocols are introduced, we may have to update or enhance our cloud platform to allow us to continue to provide services to customers. Our competitors or other vendors may refuse to work with us to allow their products to interoperate with our solutions, which could make it difficult for our cloud platform to function properly in customer networks that include these third-party products.
We may not deliver or maintain interoperability quickly or cost-effectively, or at all. These efforts require capital investment and engineering resources. If we fail to maintain compatibility of our cloud platform with our customers’ network and security infrastructures, our customers may not be able to fully utilize our solutions, and we may, among other consequences, lose or fail to increase our market share and experience reduced demand for our services, which would materially harm our business, operating results and financial condition.
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Risks Related to Our Sales and Operations
If we are not able to maintain and enhance our brand, our business and results of operations may be adversely affected.
We believe that maintaining and enhancing our reputation as a provider of high-quality security solutions is critical to our relationship with our existing customers and channel partners and our ability to attract new customers and channel partners. The successful promotion of our brand will depend on a number of factors, including our marketing efforts, our ability to continue to develop high-quality features and solutions for our cloud platform, uninterrupted delivery of our cloud services and our ability to successfully differentiate our platform from competitive products and services. Our brand promotion activities may not be successful or yield increased revenue. In addition, independent industry or financial analysts often provide reviews of our platform, as well as products and services of our competitors, and perception of our platform in the marketplace may be significantly influenced by these reviews. If these reviews are negative, or less positive as compared to those of our competitors’ products and services, our brand may be adversely affected. Additionally, the performance of our channel partners may affect our brand and reputation if customers do not have a positive experience with our channel partners’ services. The promotion of our brand requires us to make substantial expenditures, and we anticipate that the expenditures will increase as our market becomes more competitive, we expand into new markets and more sales are generated through our channel partners. To the extent that these activities yield increased revenue, this revenue may not offset the increased expenses we incur. If we do not successfully maintain and enhance our brand, our business may not grow, we may have reduced pricing power relative to competitors and we could lose customers or fail to attract potential customers, all of which would materially and adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
If we do not effectively develop and expand our sales and marketing capabilities, we may be unable to add new customers or increase sales to our existing customers, and our business will be adversely affected.
To increase the number of customers and increase the market acceptance of our platform, we will need to expand our sales and marketing operations, including our domestic and international sales force. Although we have a channel sales model, our sales representatives typically engage in direct interaction with our prospective customers. Therefore, we continue to be substantially dependent on our sales force to obtain new customers. Increasing our customer base and achieving broader market acceptance of our cloud platform will depend, to a significant extent, on our ability to expand and further invest in our sales and marketing operations and activities. There is significant competition for sales personnel with the advanced sales skills and technical knowledge we need. We believe that selling a cloud-based security solution requires particularly talented sales personnel with the ability to communicate the transformative potential of our cloud platform. Our ability to achieve significant growth in revenue in the future will depend, in large part, on our success in recruiting, training and retaining enough talented sales personnel in both the U.S. and international markets.
New hires require significant training and may take significant time before they achieve full productivity. As a result, our new hires and planned hires may not become as productive as we would like, and we may be unable to hire or retain enough qualified individuals in the future. As a result of our rapid growth, a large percentage of our sales and marketing team is new to our company and selling our solutions, and therefore this team may be less effective than our more seasoned employees. Furthermore, hiring sales personnel in new countries, or expanding our existing presence, requires upfront and ongoing expenditures that we may not recover if the sales personnel fail to achieve full productivity. We cannot predict whether, or to what extent, our sales will increase as we expand our sales force or how long it will take for sales personnel to become productive. The effectiveness of our sales and marketing has also varied over time and, together with the effectiveness of any partners or resellers we may engage, may vary in the future. Our business and operating results may be harmed if our efforts do not generate a correspondingly significant increase in revenue. We may not achieve anticipated revenue growth from expanding our sales force if we are unable to hire, develop and retain talented sales personnel, if our new sales personnel are
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unable to achieve desired productivity levels in a reasonable period of time, or if our sales and marketing programs are not effective.
Our sales cycles can be long and unpredictable, and our sales efforts require considerable time and expense.
The timing of our sales and related revenue recognition is difficult to predict because of the length and unpredictability of the sales cycle for our cloud platform, particularly with respect to large organizations. Our sales efforts typically involve educating our prospective customers about the uses, benefits and the value proposition of our cloud platform. Customers often view the subscription to our cloud platform as a significant decision as part of a strategic transformation initiative and, as a result, frequently require considerable time to evaluate, test and qualify our platform prior to entering into or expanding a relationship with us. Large enterprises and government entities in particular often undertake a significant evaluation process that further lengthens the sales cycle. In addition, the impact of macroeconomic conditions could materially and adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition by reducing sales, lengthening sales cycles and lowering prices for our services. We have experienced and may experience in the future increased scrutiny and a longer approval process for initial purchases by new customers, as a result of challenging macroeconomic conditions, and we cannot predict how long these economic conditions may persist.
Our sales force develops relationships directly with our customers, and together with our channel account teams, works with our channel partners on account penetration, account coordination, sales and overall market development. We spend substantial time and resources on our sales efforts without any assurance that our efforts will produce a sale. Platform purchases are frequently subject to budget constraints, multiple approvals and unanticipated administrative, processing and other delays. As a result, it is difficult to predict whether and when a sale will be completed and when revenue from a sale will be recognized.
Sales to larger customers involve risks that may not be present, or that are present to a lesser extent, with sales to smaller customers, which can act as a disincentive to our sales team to pursue these larger customers. These risks include:
•competition from companies that traditionally target larger enterprises and that may have pre-existing relationships or purchase commitments from such customers;
•increased purchasing power and leverage held by larger customers in negotiating contractual arrangements with us;
•more stringent requirements in our support obligations; and
•longer sales cycles and the associated risk that substantial time and resources may be spent on a potential customer that elects not to purchase our solutions.
The failure of our efforts to secure sales after investing resources in a lengthy sales process could materially and adversely affect our business and operating results.
Because we recognize revenue from subscriptions for our services over the term of the subscription, downturns or upturns in new business may not be immediately reflected in our operating results and may be difficult to discern.
We generally recognize revenue from customers ratably over the terms of their subscriptions, which are typically one to three years. As a result, a substantial portion of the revenue we report in each period is attributable to the recognition of deferred revenue relating to agreements that we entered into during previous periods. Consequently, any increase or decline in new sales or renewals in any one period may not be immediately reflected in our revenue for that period. Any such change, however, may affect our revenue in future periods. Additionally, subscriptions that are invoiced annually in advance or multi-year in advance contribute significantly to our short-term and long-term deferred revenue. Accordingly, the effect of downturns or upturns in new sales and potential changes in our rate of renewals may not be fully reflected in our results of
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operations until future periods. We may also be unable to reduce our cost structure in line with a significant deterioration in sales or renewals. Our subscription model also makes it difficult for us to rapidly increase our revenue through additional sales in any period, as revenue from new customers must be recognized over the applicable subscription term.
We provide service level commitments under our customer contracts. If we fail to meet these contractual commitments, we could be obligated to provide credits for future service and our business could suffer.
Our customer agreements contain service level commitments, which contain specifications regarding the availability and performance of our cloud platform. Any failure of or disruption to our infrastructure could impact the performance of our platform and the availability of services to customers. If we are unable to meet our stated service level commitments or if we suffer extended periods of poor performance or unavailability of our platform, we may be contractually obligated to provide affected customers with service credits for future subscriptions, and, in certain cases, refunds. In addition, the limitation of liability provisions in our customer agreements may not fully or effectively protect us from claims as a result of federal, state or local laws or ordinances or unfavorable judicial decisions in the United States or other countries. To date, there has not been a material failure to meet our service level commitments, and we do not currently have any material liabilities accrued on our balance sheet for such commitments. Our revenue, other results of operations and financial condition could be harmed if we suffer performance issues or downtime that exceeds the service level commitments under our agreements with our customers.
Our ability to maintain customer satisfaction depends in part on the quality of our customer support, including the quality of the support provided on our behalf by certain channel partners. Failure to maintain high-quality customer support could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.
If we do not provide superior support to our customers, our ability to renew subscriptions, increase the number of users and sell additional services to customers may be adversely affected. We believe that successfully delivering our cloud solution requires a highly skilled level of customer support and engagement. We or our channel partners must assist our customers to deploy our cloud platform, resolve performance issues, address interoperability challenges with a customer’s existing network and security infrastructure and respond to security threats and cyberattacks. Many enterprises, particularly large organizations, have very complex networks and require high levels of focused support, including premium support offerings, to fully realize the benefits of our cloud platform. Any failure by us to maintain the expected level of support could reduce customer satisfaction and hurt our customer retention, particularly with respect to our large enterprise customers. Additionally, if our channel partners do not provide support to the satisfaction of our customers, we may be required to provide this level of support to those customers, which would require us to hire additional personnel and to invest in additional resources. We may not be able to hire such resources fast enough to keep up with demand, particularly if the sales of our platform exceed our internal forecasts. We may also not be successful in our efforts to fully onboard new hires and provide adequate training to our employees, many of whom continue to work remotely. To the extent that we or our channel partners are unsuccessful in hiring, training and retaining adequate support resources, our ability and the ability of our channel partners to provide adequate and timely support to our customers will be negatively impacted, and our customers’ satisfaction with our cloud platform could be adversely affected. We currently rely in part on contractors provided by third-party service providers internationally to provide support services to our customers, and we expect to expand our international customer service support team to other countries. Any failure to properly train or oversee such contractors could result in a poor customer experience and an adverse impact on our reputation and ability to renew subscriptions or engage new customers. Furthermore, as we sell our solutions internationally, our support organization faces additional challenges, including those associated with delivering support, training and documentation in languages other than English. Any failure to maintain high-quality customer support, or a market perception that we do not maintain high-quality support, could materially harm our reputation, adversely affect our ability to sell our solutions to existing and prospective customers and could harm our business, financial condition and results of operations.
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We rely on our key technical, sales and management personnel to grow our business, and the loss of one or more key employees or the inability to attract and retain qualified personnel could harm our business.
Our future success is substantially dependent on our ability to attract, retain and motivate the members of our management team and other key employees throughout our organization. In particular, we are highly dependent on the services of Jay Chaudhry, our chief executive officer and chairman of our board of directors, who is critical to our future vision and strategic direction. We rely on our leadership team in the areas of operations, security, marketing, sales, support and general and administrative functions, and on individual contributors on our research and development team. Although we have entered into employment agreements with our key personnel, these agreements have no specific duration and constitute at-will employment. We do not maintain key person life insurance policies on any of our employees. The loss of one or more of our executive officers or key employees could seriously harm our business. In the last year, we have added several new senior management employees. Any significant leadership change or senior management transition involves risk, especially nearly simultaneous changes involving so many leaders and employees, and any failure to transition effectively or to retain these new leaders could hinder our strategic planning, business execution and future performance.
To execute our growth plan, we must attract and retain highly qualified personnel. Competition for these personnel in the San Francisco Bay Area, where our headquarters are located, and in other locations where we operate, is intense, especially for experienced sales professionals and for engineers experienced in designing and developing cloud applications, security software and AI and ML solutions. In addition, the United States and other regions in which we operate have in the past and may again in the future experience acute workforce shortages for highly skilled workers, which in turn, can create hyper-competitive wage environments that may impact our ability to attract and retain employees. We have from time to time experienced, and we may continue to experience, difficulty in hiring and retaining employees with appropriate qualifications. For example, in recent years, recruiting, hiring and retaining employees with expertise in the cybersecurity industry has become increasingly difficult as the demand for cybersecurity professionals has increased as a result of the ongoing cybersecurity attacks on global corporations and governments. Many of the companies with which we compete for experienced personnel have greater resources than we have. In addition, job candidates and existing employees often consider the value of the equity awards they receive in connection with their employment. Volatility or lack of performance in our stock price may also affect our ability to attract and retain our key employees.
If we fail to successfully attract, integrate or retain qualified personnel to fulfill our current or future needs, or if we need to materially increase the value of the compensation packages necessary to attract and retain these employees, our business, operating results and financial condition could be materially and adversely affected.
Our business depends, in part, on sales to the public sector and significant changes in the contracting or fiscal policies of such public sector organizations could have an adverse effect on our business and operating results.
We derive a significant portion of our revenue from contracts with government organizations, and we believe the success and growth of our business will in part depend on our successful procurement of additional public sector customers. However, demand from government organizations is often unpredictable, and we cannot assure you that we will be able to maintain or grow our revenue from the public sector. Sales to government entities are subject to substantial risks, including the following:
•selling to government agencies can be highly competitive, expensive and time-consuming, often involving significantly longer procurement cycles than commercial sales, and significant upfront time and expense without any assurance that such efforts will generate a sale;
•U.S. or other government requirements relating to the formation, administration and performance of contracts with the public sector affect how we and our channel partners do business with governmental agencies;
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•U.S. or other government certification requirements applicable to our cloud platform, including the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), are often difficult and costly to obtain and maintain and failure to do so will restrict our ability to sell to government customers;
•government demand and payment for our services may be impacted by public sector budgetary cycles and annual funding authorizations, including the impacts of possible government shutdowns, and government sales are inherently at risk of securing funding;
•sales to the U.S. and other governments are subject to procurement regulations, which impose heightened compliance obligations on us and our channel partners;
•governments routinely investigate and audit government contractors’ administrative processes and compliance with procurement regulations and any unfavorable investigation or audit could result in fines, civil or criminal liability, further investigations, damage to our reputation and debarment from further government business; and
•government customers procuring commercial items get the benefit of more favorable terms and conditions by operation of law, regardless of agreed upon contractual terms.
The occurrence of any of the foregoing could cause governments and governmental agencies to delay or refrain from purchasing our solutions in the future and could result in temporary suspension or permanent debarment from sales to government organizations. Any such penalties, disruptions or limitations in our or our channel partners' ability to do business with the public sector could have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results, financial condition and prospects.
Our international operations expose us to significant risks, and failure to manage those risks could materially and adversely impact our business.
Historically, we have derived a significant portion of our revenue from outside the United States. We derived approximately 50%, 50% and 51% of our revenue from our international customers in fiscal 2024, fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2022, respectively. As of July 31, 2024, approximately 63% of our full-time employees were located outside of the United States. We are continuing to adapt to and develop strategies to address international markets and our growth strategy includes continued expansion into target geographies, but there is no guarantee that such efforts will be successful. We expect that our international activities will continue to grow in the future, as we continue to pursue opportunities in international markets. These international operations will require significant management attention and financial resources and are subject to substantial risks, including:
•political, economic and social uncertainty or international conflict, such as the current conflicts between Russia and Ukraine and in the Middle East;
•unexpected costs for the localization of our services, including translation into foreign languages and adaptation for local practices and regulatory requirements;
•greater difficulty in enforcing contracts and accounts receivable collection, and longer collection periods;
•reduced or uncertain protection for intellectual property rights in some countries;
•greater risk of unexpected changes in regulatory practices, tariffs and tax laws and treaties;
•greater risk of a failure of foreign employees, partners, distributors and resellers to comply with both U.S. and foreign laws, including antitrust regulations, anti-bribery laws, export and import control laws, trade and economic sanctions and any applicable trade regulations ensuring fair trade practices;
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•requirements to comply with foreign privacy, data protection, cybersecurity and information security laws and regulations and the risks and costs of noncompliance;
•increased expenses incurred in establishing and maintaining office space and equipment for our international operations;
•difficulties in complying with regulations relating to AI and ML;
•greater difficulty in identifying, attracting and retaining local qualified personnel, and the costs and expenses associated with such activities;
•differing employment practices and labor relations issues;
•difficulties in managing and staffing international offices and increased travel, infrastructure and legal compliance costs associated with multiple international locations;
•fluctuations in exchange rates between the U.S. dollar and foreign currencies in markets where we do business, including the British Pound, Indian Rupee and Euro, and related impact on sales cycles; and
•the impact of natural disasters and public health pandemics and epidemics on customers, partners, suppliers, employees, travel and the global economy.
As we continue to develop and grow our business globally, our success will depend, in large part, on our ability to anticipate and effectively manage these risks. The expansion of our existing international operations and entry into additional international markets will require significant management attention and financial resources. Our failure to successfully manage our international operations and the associated risks could limit the future growth of our business.
Future acquisitions, strategic investments, partnerships or alliances could be difficult to identify and integrate, divert the attention of key management personnel, disrupt our business, dilute stockholder value and adversely affect our operating results, financial condition and prospects.
Our business strategy includes acquiring other complementary solutions, technologies or businesses. We have in the past acquired, and expect in the future to acquire, businesses that we believe will complement or augment our existing business. In order to expand our security offerings and features, we also may enter into relationships with other businesses, which could involve preferred or exclusive licenses, additional channels of distribution or investments in other companies. Negotiating these transactions can be time-consuming, difficult and costly, and our ability to close these transactions may be subject to third-party approvals, such as government regulatory approvals, which are beyond our control. Consequently, we cannot assure you that these transactions, once undertaken and announced, will close.
These kinds of acquisitions or investments may result in unforeseen operating difficulties and expenditures. In particular, we may encounter difficulties assimilating or integrating the businesses, technologies, products and services, personnel or operations of companies that we may acquire, particularly if the key personnel of an acquired business choose not to work for us. We may have difficulty retaining the customers of any acquired business or using or continuing the development of the acquired technologies. Acquisitions may also disrupt our ongoing business, divert our resources and require significant management attention that would otherwise be available for development of our business. We may not successfully evaluate or utilize the acquired technology or personnel, or accurately forecast the financial impact of an acquisition transaction, including accounting charges. Any acquisition or investment could expose us to unknown liabilities. Moreover, we cannot assure you that the anticipated benefits of any acquisition or investment would be realized or that we would not be exposed to unknown liabilities. In connection with these types of transactions, we may:
•issue additional equity securities that would dilute our stockholders;
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•use cash that we may need in the future to operate our business;
•incur debt on terms unfavorable to us or that we are unable to repay;
•incur large charges or substantial liabilities;
•encounter difficulties integrating diverse business cultures;
•experience delays in extending our internal control over financial reporting to new acquisitions or investments;
•experience delays in our quarterly close process and related filings with the SEC; and
•become subject to adverse tax consequences, substantial depreciation or deferred compensation charges.
These challenges related to acquisitions or investments could adversely affect our business, operating results, financial condition and prospects.
If we are unable to effectively manage certain risks and challenges related to our India operations, our business could be harmed.
We believe that our significant presence in India provides important advantages for our business, such as direct access to a large pool of skilled professionals. However, it also creates certain risks that we must effectively manage. As of July 31, 2024, 37% of our global work force is based in India and is comprised mostly of R&D, finance and operations professionals. Wage costs in India for skilled professionals are currently lower than in the United States for comparably skilled professionals. However, wages and benefit costs in India are increasing at a faster rate than in the United States, which could result in us incurring increased costs for technical professionals. There is intense competition in India for skilled technical professionals, and we expect such competition to increase. As a result, we may be unable to retain our current employee base in India or hire additional new talent or do so cost-effectively. In addition, India has recently experienced significant inflation and low growth. India also has experienced natural disasters, civil unrest and terrorism and, in the past, has been involved in conflicts with neighboring countries. If we are unable to effectively manage any of the foregoing risks related to our India operations, our development efforts and operations could be impaired, which could materially and negatively impact our growth and operating results.
Our failure to raise additional capital necessary to expand our operations and invest in new solutions could reduce our ability to compete and could harm our business.
We expect that our existing cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments will be sufficient to meet our anticipated cash needs for working capital, capital expenditures and Notes repayment requirements for at least the next 12 months. We may, however, need to raise additional funds to fund our operating expenses, make capital purchases, acquire or invest in business or technology, and we may not be able to obtain those funds on favorable terms, or at all. If we raise additional equity financing, our stockholders may experience significant dilution of their ownership interests and the per share value of our common stock could decline. Furthermore, if we engage in additional debt financing, the holders of our debt would have priority over the holders of our common stock, and we may be required to accept terms that restrict our ability to incur additional indebtedness or our ability to pay any dividends on our common stock, though we do not intend to pay dividends in the foreseeable future. We may also be required to take other actions, any of which could harm our business and operating results. If we need to access the capital markets, there can be no assurance that financing may be available on attractive terms, if at all. If we are unable to obtain adequate financing, or financing on terms satisfactory to us, when we require it, our ability to continue to support our business growth and to respond to business challenges could be significantly limited, and our business, operating results, financial condition and prospects could be materially and adversely affected.
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Risks Related to Information Technology, Intellectual Property, Data Security and Privacy
The actual or perceived failure of our cloud platform to block malware or prevent a security breach or incident could harm our reputation and adversely impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.
Our cloud platform may fail to detect or prevent security breaches or incidents for any number of reasons. Our cloud platform is complex and may contain performance issues that are not detected until after its deployment. We also provide frequent solution updates and fundamental enhancements, which increase the possibility of errors, and our reporting, tracking, monitoring and quality assurance procedures may not be sufficient to ensure we detect any such defects in a timely manner. The performance of our cloud platform can be negatively impacted by our failure to enhance, expand or update our cloud platform, bugs, errors or defects in our software, improper classification of websites by our vendors who provide us with lists of malicious websites, improper deployment or configuration of our services and many other factors.
In addition, the techniques used by cyber threat actors, including state sponsored actors, to access or sabotage networks and other systems change frequently and generally are not recognized until launched against a target. As a result, there is a risk that a cyber threat could emerge that our services are unable to detect or prevent until after some of our customers are impacted. The growth in state sponsored cyber activity showcases the increasing sophistication of cyber threats and dramatically expands the global threat landscape. Moreover, as our services are adopted by an increasing number of enterprises, it is possible that the individuals and organizations behind cyber threats will focus on finding ways to defeat our services. If this happens, our cloud platform could be targeted by attacks specifically designed to disrupt our business and create the perception that our cloud platform is not capable of providing superior security, which, in turn, could have a serious impact on our reputation as a provider of security solutions. Further, high profile security breaches or incidents, in particular those of cloud-based service providers, may cause our customers and potential customers to lose trust in cloud solutions generally, and with respect to security in particular, which could materially and adversely impact our ability to retain existing customers or attract new customers.
Increasingly, enterprises are subject to a wide variety of attacks on their networks and systems, including traditional threat actors, malicious code (such as viruses and worms), social engineering attacks (such as deep fakes), targeted phishing attacks made more sophisticated with the development of AI and ML, distributed denial-of-service attacks, advanced attacks conducted or sponsored by nation-states, advanced persistent threat intrusions, ransomware and other malware and theft or misuse of intellectual property or business or personal data, including by disgruntled employees, former employees or contractors. No security solution, including our cloud platform, can address all possible security threats or block all methods of penetrating a network or otherwise perpetrating a security breach or incident. Our customers typically rely on complex network and security infrastructures, which include products and services from multiple vendors, to secure their networks. If any of our customers becomes infected with malware or experiences a security breach or incident, they could be disappointed with our services, regardless of whether our services are intended to block the attack or would have blocked the attack if the customer had properly configured our cloud platform. Additionally, if any enterprises that are publicly known to use our services are the subject of a cyberattack that becomes publicized, our current or potential customers may look to our competitors for alternatives to our services.
From time to time, industry or financial analysts and research firms test our solutions against other security products. Our services may fail to detect or prevent threats in any particular test for a number of reasons, including misconfiguration. To the extent potential customers, industry or financial analysts or testing firms believe that the occurrence of a failure to detect or prevent any particular threat is a flaw or indicates that our services do not provide significant value, our reputation and business could be materially harmed.
Any real or perceived flaws in our cloud platform or any real, perceived or purported security breaches or other security incidents of our customers could result in:
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•a loss of existing or potential customers or channel partners;
•delayed or lost sales and harm to our financial condition and results of operations;
•a delay in attaining, or the failure to attain, market acceptance;
•the expenditure of significant financial resources in efforts to analyze, correct, eliminate, remediate or work around errors or defects, to address and eliminate vulnerabilities and to address any applicable legal or contractual obligations relating to any actual, perceived or purported security breach or incident;
•negative publicity and damage to our reputation and brand; and
•legal claims and demands (including for stolen assets or information, repair of system damages, and compensation to customers and business partners), litigation, regulatory inquiries or investigations and other liability.
Any of the above results could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.