It’s such a pain in the ass presenting and justifying budget requests when the people who decide only see $$$. It’s always “Why do you need this much? We’ve been doing fine the last couple of years.”. The only way to get them to understand is to talk to them in $$$-speak. Like, “This is the amount of the money and reputation you are risking to lose if something happens because we didn’t spend for this.”
You have to talk-the-talk.
You don’t talk about Gigabytes and megabits-per-second and megawatts with sales people and executives. You need to turn things around and talk in terms of money and man-power. If it frustrating that you have to do that, but it is the best way to get through to people.