What is EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud and its benefits to IT networks?

Elastic Compute Cloud  is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on proven computing environment.  EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.Benefits of EC2Elastic Web-Scale Computing EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.Completely Controlled You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. You can stop your instance while retaining the data on your boot partition and then subsequently restart the same instance using web service APIs. Instances can be rebooted remotely using web service APIs. You also have access to console output of your instances.Flexible Cloud Hosting Services You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages.  EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application. For example, your choice of operating systems includes numerous Linux distributions, and Microsoft Windows Server.Designed for use with Web ServicesEC2 works in conjunction with Simple Storage Service ( S3),  Relational Database Service ( RDS),  Simple DB and  Simple Queue Service ( SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.Reliable EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within proven network infrastructure and data centers. The EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is.% availability for each EC2 Region.Secure EC2 works in conjunction with  VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your compute resources.Your compute instances are located in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with an IP range that you specify. You decide which instances are exposed to the Internet and which remain private.Security Groups and networks ACLs allow you to control inbound and outbound network access to and from your instances.You can connect your existing IT infrastructure to resources in your VPC using industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN connections.For additional isolation, you can provision your EC2 resources on Dedicated Hosts or as Dedicated Instances. Both allow you to use EC2 instances in a VPC on hardware dedicated to a single customer. If you do not have a default VPC you must create a VPC and launch instances into that VPC to leverage advanced networking features such as private subnets, outbound security group filtering, network ACLs, Dedicated Instances, and VPN connections.Inexpensive EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of  scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume. See  EC2 Instance Purchasing Options for a more detailed description.Easy to Start Quickly get started with  EC2 by visiting AWS Marketplace to choose preconfigured software on  Machine Images (AMIs). You can quickly deploy this software to EC2 via1-Click launch or with the EC2 console.

Well ec2 is just like local server. The main benefit of using ec2 instances is that you can create/add new instances within just few clicks. 

on-demand delivery of compute power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Highly Scalable, can configure Load Balancing.

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) - is like a VM. This might help IT Network to have an another server with your desired specification and budget. There are other EC2 types that suits on how long will you use the server.