Researchers need to be able to integrate ever-increasing amounts of data into their institutional databases, regardless of the source, format, or size of the data. It is then necessary to use the increasing diversity of data to derive greater value from data for their organization. The processing of electronic data plays a central role in modern society. Data constitute a fundamental part of operational processes in companies and scientific organizations. In addition, they form the basis for decisions. Bad data quality can negatively affect decisions and have a negative impact on results. The quality of the data is crucial. This includes the new theme of data wrangling, sometimes referred to as data munging or data crunching, to find the dirty data and to transform and clean them. The aim of data wrangling is to prepare a lot of raw data in their original state so that they can be used for further analysis steps. Only then can knowledge be obtained that may bring added value. This paper shows how the data wrangling process works and how it can be used in database systems to clean up data from heterogeneous data sources during their acquisition and integration.

Since the turn of the millennium, the volume of data has increased significantly in both industries and scientific institutions. The processing of these volumes and variety of data we are dealing with are unlikely to be accomplished with conventional software solutions. Thus, new technologies belonging to the big data processing area, able to distribute and process data in a scalable way, are integrated into classical Business Intelligence (BI) systems or replace them. Furthermore, we can benefit from big data technologies to gain knowledge about security, which can be obtained from massive databases. The paper presents a security-relevant data analysis based on the big data analytics engine Apache Spark. A prototype intrusion detection system is developed aimed at detecting data anomalies through machine learning by using the k-means algorithm for clustering analysis implemented in Sparks MLlib. The extraction of features to detect anomalies is currently challenging because the problem of detecting anomalies is not actively and exhaustively monitored. The detection of abnormal data can be effectuated by using relevant data that are already in companies’ and scientific organizations’ possession. Their interpretation and further processing in a continuous manner can sufficiently contribute to anomaly and intrusion detection.

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.