March 2014
In this issue

Did you give your business a spring clean this year? Are you looking for new ways to boost sales, build your brand or get your business plan back on track?

This is the topic of one of SBA's monthly web chats € Small Business Spring Clean: How to Keep Your Business Ideas Fresh € hosted by Octavia Kuransky, Program Development Manager at Central Alabama Women€s Business Center (and archived on SBA€s Learning Center).

Check out some of these great suggestions from Octavia€s session and be inspired!

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When was the last time you seriously thought about your business€s disaster recovery plan? If you€re like most small businesses you€ve thought about it briefly and then put it aside as something that is not pressing and can be dealt with another day, when your to-do list is shorter or you have more time. According to a Forrester Research Study 24% of companies polled had experienced a full data disaster and with less than 40% of all small to medium-sized businesses properly and regularly backing up their data, many are unable to recover. Now is the time to put in place a backup and disaster recovery plan before your company experiences an unexpected disaster and becomes one of the 70% of businesses that goes out of business within two years of suffering a serious data loss.

Don€t let this be you when disaster strikes!

One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is believing that a disaster will never happen to them. For many people the word disaster is associated with big weather events like hurricanes or earthquakes and the ensuing damage from flooding and fires but disasters are day-to-day occurrences. When it comes to technology many of us have done something that could endanger our data to the point of no return, whether it€s accidently downloading a virus from an untrusted email attachment or deleting something by mistake, and it€s important to plan for the human error we all are susceptible to. Your data is the backbone of your company and keeping it safe from all potential negative forces is key. Read more

Microsoft will no longer support Windows XP and Small Business Server 2003 so it€s time to make the change to ensure you remain on supported versions of Windows and Office.

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If your city suddenly decided to double the amount of waterfront property available for development, would you buy or would you be skeptical? That€s what€s happening on the Internet. More top-level domain names are being created so businesses can finally get those prize web addresses they€ve always wanted.  For small businesses there are 2 things to consider before rushing to preregister your new domain name: credibility and whether or not it will actually help your business. 

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