Internal users are reporting high latency when connecting to external servers in the cloud. Which of the following should a network administrator optimize?

The WAN (Wide Area Network) is the infrastructure connecting the internal corporate network to external resources such as cloud servers. When users experience high latency accessing those external endpoints, the WAN link - including its bandwidth allocation, routing configuration, and QoS policies - is the correct layer to optimize. Techniques like traffic shaping, compression, and protocol optimization can directly reduce round-trip latency over the WAN.

A SAN (Storage Area Network) is a dedicated high-speed network for block-level storage access between servers and storage arrays, and has no bearing on latency to external cloud servers.

A VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) is a logical segmentation of a local network used to isolate broadcast domains and control internal traffic, not to manage connectivity or latency to external cloud endpoints.

A LAN (Local Area Network) covers the internal network infrastructure within a site; optimizing the LAN does not address latency issues that occur on the path to external cloud servers.