You gave me flashbacks to a far worse bureaucratic nightmare with #2 in my last job.
I supported an application with a team of about three people for a regional headquarters in the DoD. We had one stack of aging hardware that was racked, on a handshake agreement with another team, in a nearby facility under that other team's control. We had to periodically request physical access for maintenance tasks and the facility routinely lost power, suffered local network outages, etc. So we decided that we needed new hardware and more of it spread across the region to avoid the shaky single-point-of-failure.
That began a three year process of: waiting for budget to be available for the hardware / license / support purchases; pitching PowerPoints to senior management to argue for that budget (and getting updated quotes every time from the vendors); working out agreements with other teams at new facilities to rack the hardware; traveling to those sites to install stuff; and working through the cybersecurity compliance stuff for each site. I left before everything was finished, so I don't know how they ultimately dealt with needing, say, someone to physically reseat a cable in Japan (an international flight away).
I supported an application with a team of about three people for a regional headquarters in the DoD. We had one stack of aging hardware that was racked, on a handshake agreement with another team, in a nearby facility under that other team's control. We had to periodically request physical access for maintenance tasks and the facility routinely lost power, suffered local network outages, etc. So we decided that we needed new hardware and more of it spread across the region to avoid the shaky single-point-of-failure.
That began a three year process of: waiting for budget to be available for the hardware / license / support purchases; pitching PowerPoints to senior management to argue for that budget (and getting updated quotes every time from the vendors); working out agreements with other teams at new facilities to rack the hardware; traveling to those sites to install stuff; and working through the cybersecurity compliance stuff for each site. I left before everything was finished, so I don't know how they ultimately dealt with needing, say, someone to physically reseat a cable in Japan (an international flight away).