CERN was a good example of how much can be done with how little when you have the right people.

For a long time, the entire Linux distribution (Scientific Linux) used for ~15K collaborators, the infra and the grid computing was managed by a team of around 4-5 people.

The teams managing the network access (LanDB), the distributed computing system, the scientific framework (ROOT) and the storage are also small, dedicated skilled teams.

And the result speaks for itself.

Unfortunately, most of that went to shit quite recently when they replaced the previous head of IT by a Microsoft fanboy/girl coming from outside of the scientific environment. The first thing he/she did was to force Microsoft bloatware everywhere to replace existing working OSS solutions.