Now a day’s cloud computing breaks almost all the barriers of large scale computing and widens the scope of massive computational possibilities. Cloud computing provides various benefits to the whole computing societies such as on demand flexi pay access to techno business services and wide range of computing resources requires an exponential growth in its technology put forth serious challenges including VM load balancing especially in cloud data centers. It dynamically distributes the workload across multiple servers in the cloud data center so that not even a single server involved is underutilized or overutilized. If load balancing is not done properly in the cloud then it leads to the inefficiency in processor utilization that in turn risks the provider by creating a significant problem of increase in overall energy consumption and the world by increasing the carbon emissions. Lots of different techniques like Round Robin, Throttled and Equally Spread Current Execution are claimed to provide efficient mechanisms to resolve this problem. This paper compares and summaries the existing load balancing techniques which are used to solve the issues in cloud environment by considering the data center processing time and response time and propose an improved load balancing strategy believed to be a efficient solution for the cloud load balancing issues. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.