This kind of thing is like insurance. Maybe IT failed to state the consequences of not having redundancy, maybe people in control of the money failed to understand.. or maybe the risks were understood and accepted.

Either way, by not paying for the insurance (redundant systems) up front the organization is explicitly taking on the risk.

Whether the cost now is higher is impossible to say as an outsider, but there's a lot of expenses: paying a premium for emergency repairs/replacement; paying salaries to a bunch of staff who are unable to work at full capacity (or maybe at all); a bunch of IT projects delayed because staff is dealing with an outage; and maybe downstream ripple effects, like classes cancelled or research projects in jeopardy.

I've never worked in academics, but I know people that do and understand the budget nonsense they go through. It doesn't change the reality, though, which is systems fail and if you don't plan for that you'll pay dearly.