Cloud computing has become increasingly crucial in technology, offering significant benefits by enabling organizations to avoid heavy investments in physical infrastructure. Cloud environments host a multitude of virtualized resources, making load balancing essential to prevent overloading specific servers and optimize overall resource utilization. The current work presents a detailed study of various strategies adopted for load balancing more specifically in a cloud environment from 2012 to 2023. We studied 55 papers in detail, analyzing the diverse approaches adopted in these studies. The review offers a comprehensive analysis of various load-balancing strategies, focusing on maximizing resource consumption and improving system performance. We identified that heuristic-based algorithms often outperform traditional methods in dynamic and heterogeneous cloud environments. The study selection was based on relevance to current cloud architectures and performance metrics. Our findings highlight emerging trends and challenges, particularly in optimizing load balancing for real-time applications and energy-efficient operations. This paper provides valuable insights that can guide future research and practical applications, contributing to the ongoing discourse on efficient resource management in cloud environment.