MIME 2017 Annual Report

19 Privacy and data protections laws and regulations are subject to new and differing interpretations and there may be significant inconsistency in laws and regulations among the jurisdictions in which we operate or offer our SaaS solutions. Legal and other regulatory requirements could restrict our ability to store and process data as part of our SaaS solutions, or, in some cases, impact our ability to offer our SaaS products in certain jurisdictions. Such laws may also impact our customers' ability to deploy certain of our solutions globally, to the extent they utilize our products for storing personal information that they store and process. In addition, in many cases these privacy laws apply not only to transfers of information to third parties, but also within an enterprise, including our company or our customers. Additionally, if third parties that we work with, violate applicable laws or our policies, such violations may also put our customers’ information at risk and could in turn have an adverse effect on our business. The costs of compliance with, and other burdens imposed by, data privacy laws, regulations and standards may require resources to create new products or modify existing products, could lead to us being subject to significant fines, penalties or liabilities for noncompliance, and may slow the pace at which we close sales transactions, any of which could harm our business. If we are unable to effectively increase sales of our services to large enterprises while mitigating the risks associated with serving such customers, our business, financial position and results of operations may suffer. As we seek to increase our sales to large enterprise customers, we may face longer sales cycles, more complex customer requirements, unfavorable contractual terms, substantial upfront sales costs and less predictability in completing some of our sales than we do with smaller customers. In addition, our ability to successfully sell our services to large enterprises is dependent on us attracting and retaining sales personnel with experience in selling to large organizations. Also, because security breaches of larger, more high-profile enterprises are likely to be heavily publicized, there is increased reputational risk associated with serving such customers. If we are unable to increase sales of our services to large enterprise customers while mitigating the risks associated with serving such customers, our business, financial position and results of operations may suffer. If we are unable to maintain successful relationships with our channel partners, our ability to acquire new customers could be adversely affected. In order to grow our business, we anticipate that we will continue to depend on our relationships with our channel partners who we rely on, in addition to our direct sales force, to sell and support our services. In our fiscal year ended March 31, 2018, while no individual channel partner accounted for 10% or more of our sales, in the aggregate, our channel partners accounted for 69% of our sales. We expect that sales to channel partners will continue to account for a substantial portion of our revenue for the foreseeable future. We utilize channel partners to efficiently increase the scale of our marketing and sales efforts, increasing our market penetration to customers which we otherwise might not reach on our own. Our ability to achieve revenue growth in the future will depend, in part, on our success in maintaining successful relationships with our channel partners. Our agreements with our channel partners are generally non-exclusive, meaning our channel partners may offer customers competitive services from different companies. If our channel partners do not effectively market and sell our services, choose to use greater efforts to market and sell their own products or services or those of others, or fail to meet the needs of our customers, our ability to grow our business, sell our services and maintain our reputation may be adversely affected. Our agreements with our channel partners generally allow them to terminate their agreements for any reason upon 90 days’ notice. The loss of key channel partners, our possible inability to replace them, or the failure to recruit additional channel partners could materially adversely affect our results of operations. If we are unable to maintain our relationships with these channel partners, our business, results of operations, financial condition or cash flows could be adversely affected. We provide service level commitments under our subscription agreements and service disruptions could obligate us to provide refunds and we could face subscription terminations, which could adversely affect our revenue. Our subscription agreements with customers provide certain service level commitments. If we are unable to meet the stated service level commitments or suffer extended periods of downtime that exceed the periods allowed under our customer agreements, we could be required to pay refunds or face subscription terminations, either of which could significantly impact our revenue. To date, we have suffered two significant service disruptions. The first occurred in 2013 and was a result of an equipment failure. Many of our customers in the United Kingdom experienced service disruptions for several hours. We also experienced a service disruption in September 2015 as a result of an external network DDoS attack. Customers using our Secure Email Gateway service in the United States experienced downtime related to the delivery and receipt of external emails for several hours. The scope of the incident was limited to network traffic and no customer data was lost or compromised. As a result of the service disruption, we voluntarily provided service credits to affected customers in the year ended March 31, 2016, totaling approximately $0.4 million. While we have undertaken substantial remedial efforts to prevent future incidents like these, we cannot guarantee that future attacks or service disruptions will not occur. Any future attacks or service disruptions could adversely affect our reputation, our relationships with our existing customers and our ability to attract new customers, all of which would impact our future revenue and operating results.