Governments worldwide are striving to balance budget constraints while enhancing digital services to boost citizen engagement and trust. A viable solution to achieve both objectives is the implementation of an application speed layer, which can significantly reduce costs and improve user experiences by optimizing interactions between mainframe applications and end-user systems. This approach, already leveraged by financial institutions, involves inserting a data layer that efficiently handles read-only transactions which constitute a large portion of user interactions. Using Elastic for this purpose not only reduces mainframe loads and operational costs but also enhances data access speed and predictability, enabling personalized service delivery, innovative insights through real-time analytics, and improved fraud prevention. By addressing congestion points in user-facing services and prioritizing the most impacted interactions, governments can initiate a low-risk proof of concept to demonstrate quick, tangible benefits, ultimately fostering a platform for sustained innovation.