Which of the following should a company use to reduce the latency of application that are deployed on a virtual private cloud?

A virtual load balancer reduces latency by evenly spreading requests across multiple backend instances within the VPC, preventing any single server from becoming a bottleneck. This directly improves application response times by optimizing resource utilization across the server pool.

NAT translates private IP addresses to public ones for routing purposes but does not reduce application-layer latency within a VPC.

Direct Connect provides a dedicated private WAN link to a cloud provider to reduce external network latency, but does not address latency for applications already deployed inside a VPC.

Multi-availability zones improve fault tolerance and geographic redundancy but can actually introduce inter-zone communication overhead, increasing rather than reducing latency.