"If you live by the sword, you die by it," said Joshua Greenbaum, an analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting in Berkeley, Calif. Many users see constant availability of data as a key benefit of hosted systems versus software that runs on-site, Greenbaum said. If that perception of the hosted concept is broken, then an important reason for using such systems is lost. The promise of hosted systems is that they are "not supposed to entail outages and downtime," he said.