The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the challenges faced by state and federal agencies in scaling their systems to meet increasing demand, particularly with aging code bases and data stored on mainframes. Efforts to address this issue have led to the adoption of event streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka, which can free data from its mainframe quarantine and enable modern, scalable applications. Many organizations lack the resources and personnel to deploy and manage Kafka clusters on their own, but having a fully managed cloud-native service like Confluent Cloud can provide a rapid deployment option with reduced maintenance overhead. The use of role-based access control and other features such as ksqlDB enables organizations to securely manage and monitor data streams, and provides opportunities for innovative uses of the data in real-time. Several case studies demonstrate successful implementations of Kafka and Confluent Platform, including Alight Solutions, RBC, and BT Group, which have reduced costs and improved system availability.