> I know that investments like this can be hard to make, precisely because there aren’t any new visible rewards
Taken individually yes, there's no new 'visible' reward.
Looking at the larger picture, say, 3 months from now, changes that used to take 3 days now take 3 hours, and there are fewer outages, reduced downtime, higher uptime, and fewer (or no) hair-on-fire-we-lost-customers issues any longer.
Establishing both short term metrics (request turnaround time) and long term metrics (uptime, data loss, security breaches, customer satisfaction, team satisfaction, employee retention, etc) will help understand justification of effort.
Taken individually yes, there's no new 'visible' reward.
Looking at the larger picture, say, 3 months from now, changes that used to take 3 days now take 3 hours, and there are fewer outages, reduced downtime, higher uptime, and fewer (or no) hair-on-fire-we-lost-customers issues any longer.
Establishing both short term metrics (request turnaround time) and long term metrics (uptime, data loss, security breaches, customer satisfaction, team satisfaction, employee retention, etc) will help understand justification of effort.