The present enhancement leaves production systems undisturbed while a remote application (“testbed application”) executes elsewhere (“testbed host”). An intermediary computing device hosts an enhanced pseudo-disk driver, pseudo-disks, and an enhanced media agent. The enhanced pseudo-disk driver creates the pseudo-disks, each one representing an associated point-in-time backup image residing in secondary storage. A network, e.g., an Internet Protocol (IP) network or a Fibre Channel (FC) Storage Area Network (SAN), connects the intermediary device with the testbed host, and the enhanced media agent exposes pseudo-disks over the network using iSCSI or FC protocol, respectively. The testbed application uses an exposed pseudo-disk as its recovery data source, such that pseudo-disk resources provide data on an as-needed basis sufficient for the testbed application to operate, yet (a) without restoring the entire associated backup image from secondary storage and (b) without impacting the production environment.