Customers are experiencing higher latency when requesting static website files stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. A SysOps administrator notes the bucket is receiving an extremely high number of GET requests. What approach will reduce latency by lowering direct load on the S3 bucket?

Creating an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as the origin is the most effective solution for reducing latency and lowering the direct load on the S3 bucket. CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that caches content at edge locations geographically closer to users. This means subsequent requests for the same static files are served from the cache, significantly reducing latency and the number of direct GET requests to the S3 bucket. Migrating the S3 bucket to a closer region might offer some latency improvement for users in that specific region but doesn't address the high load or provide global caching benefits. Cross-region replication creates a copy of the data in another region for disaster recovery or read replica purposes, but it doesn't cache content at the edge or reduce direct S3 requests from end-users. Amazon ElastiCache is an in-memory caching service primarily used for database query results or application data, not typically for caching static website files served directly from S3.