Int. J. Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, Vol. 18, Nos. 3/4, 2017 213 Copyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Critical analysis of load balancing strategies for cloud environment Anurag Jain* Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chandigarh Engineering College, Landran, Mohali, Punjab, India Email: er.anuragjain14@gmail.com *Corresponding author Rajneesh Kumar Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Maharishi Markandeshwar Engineering College, Maharishi Markandeshwar University, Mullana, Ambala, India Email: drrajneeshgujral@mmumullana.org Abstract: Future of cloud computing depends on effective installation of infrastructure, efficient utilisation of resources and dynamic transformation of load. Due to inundation of tasks at the data centre there is a need for load balancing strategy. This will help in achieving better fault tolerance ratio and higher customer satisfaction. Load balancing strategy plays an important role in the distribution of the workload dynamically across multiple nodes so that no server is either underutilised or overwhelmed. Also, due to data proliferation nature of data sources such as social media sites, geographical information systems and the weather forecasting system, there is an exponential growth of structured and unstructured data which is called big data. The present data models are not capable enough to handle big data. To process the data efficiently, there is also a need of load balancing strategy at the data centre level. In this paper, the authors experimentally analyse some popular approaches for load balancing of tasks in a cloud environment using the cloud analyst simulator. Keywords: cloud computing; cloud analyst; load balancing; task scheduling; load balancing algorithm; big data. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Jain, A. and Kumar, R. (2017) ‘Critical analysis of load balancing strategies for cloud environment’, Int. J. Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, Vol. 18, Nos. 3/4, pp.213–234. Biographical notes: Anurag Jain is working as an Associate Professor in Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chandigarh Engineering College, Landran, Mohali. He has been in the teaching field since 2003. He received his BTech and MTech from Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra, in 2003 and 2009, respectively. He has guided seven MTech students. He has about 15 publications in international journals and conferences. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD from M.M. University, Mullana, Ambala in the area of cloud computing. His research interests are in the areas of load balancing and security in cloud computing.