Yes, my company sees it as critical for both HA and DR.

We use a combination of technologies which include clustering and scaled out replication for HA and other technologies for DR.

The biggest thing to determine in all this is the TRUE need and the amount of time that you can be offline and then engineer a solution to meet those requirements. There are a myriad of options, even some homegrown that are better than nothing. Sure, your downtime might be longer with some of those options but that may be totally acceptable in the industry that you are in.

In reality all companies have a need. And there are always ways to get a solution in place, even on a very limited budget. We as DBA's just need to convince them to invest the time in getting something in place. 😀