Tell me about it...
In a previous life I had to fight insanely to get a back up system approved. Nothing too fancy, just a basic, working back up system for all of the office server content.
It was rejected multiple times because of the cost, which was no more than few thousand (it's amazing what one can do on a budget) and because they didn't see the value in something that they wouldn't immediately use.
The next proposal I included the approximate salary of all employees, applied a few metrics to the amount of "work" that they do that involved the shared server data and extrapolated this out into the value of the "work" stored on the office servers over a short of period of time and compared this to the cost of the backup system.
Rejected, again, of course but this time with the added threat of an investigation into my estimation of the staff salaries and how this was a privacy violation! A privacy violation based on guessing average salaries based on recruitment adverts...
About a year later two drives on the central file server crapped themselves within a day of each other taking down the entire array and preventing any work from happening in the company. We weren't allowed to keep spares of these and therefore while we immediately ordered a replacement for the first failure, before it could even be delivered the second drive failed.
The backup was approved the same day... a day too late of course.