A growing organization, which hosts an externally accessible application, adds multiple virtual servers to improve application performance and decrease the resource usage on individual servers. Which of the following solutions is the organization most likely to employ to further increase performance and availability?

A load balancer distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers, preventing any single server from becoming a bottleneck and improving overall application performance and availability. By adding multiple virtual servers, the organization has created a pool of resources that a load balancer can effectively manage to ensure no single server is overwhelmed. A jump server (or jump host) is a hardened server used to access other devices within a segmented network, primarily for security, not performance or availability. A proxy server acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers, often used for caching or filtering, but doesn't directly distribute traffic to multiple backend servers for performance like a load balancer. SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) optimizes connectivity over a WAN, focusing on network efficiency and cost, not the distribution of application traffic across internal servers.