The issue with outages for the Government organizations I have dealt with is rarely the outage itself - but strong communication about what is occurring and realistic approximate ETAs, or options around mitigation.
Being able to tell the Directors/Senior managers that issues have been "escalated" and providing regular updates are critical.
If all I could say was a "support ticket" was logged, and we are waiting on a reply (hours later) - I guarantee the conversation after the outage is going to be about moving to another solution provider with strong SLAs.
