- [Instructor] Hello, and welcome to this Getting Started with Migrating to the Cloud course. My name is Andrew Larkin, and I'm your mentor and navigator for this group of lectures. And it is my goal to help you become an expert in cloud migrations. So first of all, let's ask ourselves, why would we want to learn about migrations? So, let me give you some perspective. Prior to joining Cloud Academy, I worked at AWS as an AWS partner manager, and in that role, I helped many partners and customers migrate workloads to AWS, from multinational corporate customers looking to run global services or improve their backup and restore operations through to startups, who wanted to develop applications using the agility and scalability of AWS managed services. We covered and worked on a wide variety of migration scenarios and use cases. And one of the most rewarding parts of working at AWS for me was seeing just how much more agile and cost-efficient cloud services could make a business become. Now, this shift in computing is a major change, and the opportunity with cloud services is very real for business customers. So I want to share what I learnt out in the field with you so you can make the most of this market shift to public cloud services as well. Now, the other reality I saw while working in the field was the need for IT staff with cloud knowledge and cloud skills. Customers and partners were constantly looking for people with cloud knowledge and skills to help them get started with adopting public cloud services. The opportunity to become a cloud consultant, architect, developer, or specialist is very real. So in this group of lectures, we will learn to recognize and explain the core strategies, patterns, and tools of a cloud migration project. In this first course, we will learn how to recognize and explain the benefits of migrating to the cloud. We will learn to recognize and explain the stages of a cloud transformation looking at the cloud transformation maturity model, and how to recognize and identify where you and your organization might be on that cloud journey. We will learn to recognize and explain the common strategies we see with migration projects. We will discover how to recognize and implement a framework for assessing an organization's business and technical migration readiness. At the end of this course, we will have a working perspective on how to implement a migration plan. We also will have an understanding of some of the best practices around migration planning and migration execution. To make the course as practical as possible, I've used a case study company called ExpertisePlease.com so that we can get inside a migration project. Now, this case study can help provide some real-world context to the concepts we're going to cover in this course. In this course, we will be part of the ExpertisePlease.com team as they explore public cloud services as a way to transform their business to meet a changing market. So following this introduction video, we will listen to an overview of the ExpertisePlease.com business so that we are familiar with it for this course. Okay, so if you're ready, let's get started.