It describes the CTIA as “a two-day intensive course” that “buildings further on the technical understanding of the standard acquired in the CTDC. It enables participants to develop skills and knowledge to conduct an internal audit program by applying widely recognized audit principles, procedures and techniques which are aligned with the ISO-19011 auditing guideline.” Candidates must correctly answer at least 32 of the 40 multiple-choice questions on the 60-minute closed-book exam in order to obtain the CTIA certificate.
The two courses were introduced nine months after EPI and TIA entered into a licensing agreement for EPI to build and conduct courses based on ANSI/TIA-942. Edward van Leent, chairman and chief executive officer of EPI, commented on the nine-month development process: “Our team of data center experts and consultants have been working intensively to design and write the contents for these courses. We wanted to release the courses earlier, but at EPI we have always been committed to delivering high-quality programs that provide high value to our clients. So we decided to extend our development schedule to ensure that we meet that commitment, and to ensure that these courses meet the quality of the accreditation and certification rules of EXIN.”
van Leent continued, “EPI has been conducting audits based on the ANSI/TIA-942 standard ever since it was released and has conducted by far the largest number of ANSI/TIA-942-related data center audits in the world. EPI is also a member of TIA as well as the committee developing the ANSI/TIA-942 standard, and is therefore uniquely positioned to develop these courses based on the standard and our audit experience. Many consultants, designers, auditors, end-users, data center operators/owners, et cetera, don’t always fully understand the requirements of the standard or give it their own interpretation of what they think the requirements are. This has led to issues on quality-of-implementation and over- or under-investments in data centers. This usually means money being wasted and, more than that, it puts companies at risk because of design/implementation issues giving availability expectations which are not aligned with the business requirements. Many data center customers have indicated that they would like to have training on ANSI/TIA-942 to get a better understanding of the standard to ensure proper usage. These courses will help to raise the quality of ANSI/TIA-942-based implementations in the industry.”
You can find out more about EPI’s Data Center Training Framework here.