B.S. I was solo IT for a 50+ppl company, on a three-person team with a CIO/DBA and a data manager. I supported a full Windows/Exchange LAN with heavy printing needs, tape backups, internal/external infrastructural services and webservers with LOB java webapps, remote users, etc. Through all this I learned Perl from scratch, rearchitected the business systems (hardware) and reduced their production time by like 90% (two weeks to two days) with zero downtime (primordial blue-green, as it turns out), and wrote a completely new ETL flow with my new Perl skills. From four servers under a table to four racks, SaaS architecture is exceedingly simple next to all this, and the company spent probably around $10K/mo all told, maybe up to $20k while I was buying hardware.

Maybe you simply haven't seen this kind of operation in action before?