Just like cleaning out behind your bookshelves and under your couches, tidying up your IT department is something that most companies put off indefinitely.

Unlike cleaning those dust bunnies out, however, these IT infrastructure chores can make a big difference in how much energy your company uses, and how much money it can save after a big spring clean.

IT retailer CDW has come up with a comprehensive Spring Cleaning Checklist for organizations that have been waiting for brighter days to undertake big IT projects. With the economic gloom starting to recede, taking on any or all of these projects can make a big difference on your IT performance and your bottom line.

On the checklist:

• Consolidate data center server and storage systems. Eliminating excess servers and storage equipment –- or even entire data centers -- can reduce energy and management costs.

• Update, replace, or simply remove software and hardware that are no longer supported or way out of date. Organizations can take on high operational and financial risk by running systems so far past their prime that there’s little or no support available when they break down.

• Review desktop computing for opportunities to improve energy efficiency. Unused computers or printers still plugged in, desktop computers and peripherals running around the clock when they don’t need to be, failure to use the power management functions built into desktop operating systems -- all of these are easy ways to trim energy used by PCs.

• Ditto for the data center. Even if your organization has deployed new server and storage systems but still leans on the old power, cooling and management strategies, there are still more energy efficiency opportunities in the data center.

• Make a tiered storage plan and make smart use of old systems. Match the investment in storage systems with the value and currency of the data residing on them, and deduplicate archived data. For long term storage of inactive data or just for an economical, periodic backup of current data, even those old tape systems can still work well in many situations.

• Capitalize on cloud and hosted/managed services offerings. For select software applications or hardware infrastructure, cloud computing and hosted or managed services can offer economies of scale, quality of support and convenience that many organizations would be challenged to match with internal resources.

• Streamline operations by updating security group policy and user group designs. Streamline operations and free up time on both ends by updating the group policy design to grant access and rights to trusted users within major groups.

_{Photo CC-licensed by Flickr user kaiton.}