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September 22, 2026 is not an operating system shutdown date. It is a cryptographic compliance transition that changes what federal organizations can use for new systems and what they must defend in existing ones.

Legacy systems, cloud growth, and AI are reshaping government IT. See how connected visibility helps teams respond faster and keep essential services running.

What happens when a citizen-facing portal fails on the last day of a filing deadline, and the only record of the outage lives in an email thread between two engineers? In a commercial organization, that is an operational embarrassment. In a government department, it is a hole in a statutory record that an auditor will eventually ask about.

The U.S. government has cataloged over 1,700 active AI use cases, and nearly 90% of federal agencies are already using or planning to use AI. The European Commission has disclosed nearly 1,500 AI use cases across EU member states. With over 3,200 combined AI use cases cataloged across the US and EU, public sector IT leaders face an identical roadblock: traditional application delivery controllers were not designed to parse or throttle Layer 7 LLM payloads, leading to backend GPU exhaustion.

Over the past year, federal agencies gained broad access to enterprise AI through the OneGov initiative, at prices unlike any normal software deal. The current OneGov portal lists OpenAI ChatGPT Enterprise at $1 per agency, Anthropic Claude at $1 per seat, and Google Gemini for Government at $0.47 per agency. Those introductory offers begin expiring on September 30, 2026, the final day of fiscal year (FY) 26, which places renewal squarely in the FY27 planning cycle.

A recent IDC Spotlight report based on a survey of 685 public sector respondents found that 72% describe scaling AI from pilot to production as "very" or "somewhat" difficult.¹ Choosing the right model is only part of the challenge. Agencies also need to get their data ready for AI.

The new columnar metrics engine in Elastic Observability enables public sector IT teams to combine logging, metrics, and traces in one platform. As a result, SREs can improve uptime while protecting taxpayer dollars in the process. Public sector site reliability engineers (SREs) operate under a distinct set of pressures, whether that’s supporting a federal agency, a health department, a public university, or a transit authority.

Public sector reliability is not a green dashboard. It’s whether people can complete the service when it matters.