Processing Big Data with Apache Hadoop in the Current Challenging Era of COVID-19

Abstract

Big data have become a global strategic issue, as increasingly large amounts of unstructured data challenge the IT infrastructure of global organizations and threaten their capacity for strategic forecasting. As experienced in former massive information issues, big data technologies, such as Hadoop, should efficiently tackle the incoming large amounts of data and provide organizations with relevant processed information that was formerly neither visible nor manageable. After having briefly recalled the strategic advantages of big data solutions in the introductory remarks, in the first part of this paper, we focus on the advantages of big data solutions in the currently difficult time of the COVID-19 pandemic. We characterize it as an endemic heterogeneous data context; we then outline the advantages of technologies such as Hadoop and its IT suitability in this context. In the second part, we identify two specific advantages of Hadoop solutions, globality combined with flexibility, and we notice that they are at work with a “Hadoop Fusion Approach” that we describe as an optimal response to the context. In the third part, we justify selected qualifications of globality and flexibility by the fact that Hadoop solutions enable comparable returns in opposite contexts of models of partial submodels and of models of final exact systems. In part four, we remark that in both these opposite contexts, Hadoop’s solutions allow a large range of needs to be fulfilled, which fits with requirements previously identified as the current heterogeneous data structure of COVID-19 information. In the final part, we propose a framework of strategic data processing conditions. To the best of our knowledge, they appear to be the most suitable to overcome COVID-19 massive information challenges.