Software and resources, pre-deployed in accordance with a disaster recovery policy, are placed in a standby state to provide rapid disaster recovery in a cloud storage environment. When a disaster recovery situation is detected, (for example a loss of access to primary data), the pre-deployed resources are immediately activated according to the disaster recovery policy to provision and re-configure adequate resources and rapidly restore access to the data (such as restoring data from cloud backup storage). A disaster recovery situation may involve, for example, loss of hardware availability, network bandwidth interruption, or a sudden and large unforeseen jump in storage retrieval request volume (for example a recall storm).