An aspect of the present invention reduces the recovery time for business organizations in case of disasters. In one embodiment, a disaster recovery system containing a primary site and a backup site (implemented as a cluster) is maintained. Application instances are executed in both the primary site and the backup site, with the number of instances executed on the backup site being fewer than that executed on the primary site. During normal operation, user requests received are processed using only the instances executing in the primary site, while the instances executing in the backup site are used in a standby state. On identifying that a disaster has occurred, the user requests received immediately after identification of the disaster are processed using only the instances executing in the backup site. The cluster at the backup site is then scaled out to add application instances until a desired level/percentage is achieved.