**6. Conclusions**

The unstable status resulting from COVID-19 forced organizations to realize the real importance of big data applications. It has been evident during pandemics that Big Data adoption enables decision-makers to make smarter decisions in real time. The technologies behind Big Data support organizations to gain valuable insights from their data. Big Data facilitates transforming organizations' practices to a new generation of digital services ensuring that added value for customers will be achieved. Organizations utilize Big Data to detect and analyze the trends and patterns of people's behavior on social networking. Hence, an organization's decision-makers can provide optimal decisions and better, effective, and efficient services and products for the public. This review paper investigated the existing literature to define Big Data, and the types of Analytics, and compared the Big Data applications before and after COVID-19. The comparison was supported by examples from four vital sectors in the industry of Healthcare, Education, Transportation, and Banking as examples of sectors affected by COVID-19. The paper presented a detailed description of the role of data analytics and its alignment with specific big data applications in those fields. Such applications supported organizations and nations to navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic confidently. Hence, they could not only overcome challenges but also unleash opportunities and create value. The limitation of this paper is related to the limited previous studies that investigated the applications and opportunities of big data during the COVID-19 Pandemic. The future work will start by investigating the challenges faced by organizations on different levels, it will also investigate the critical success factors of Big Data and their categories toward developing a conceptual model for Big Data implementation.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, Z.A.A.-S., M.H.H., S.M.S.-M., R.M.S.A., N.D., L.A. and A.H.G.; methodology, Z.A.A.-S.; formal analysis, Z.A.A.-S.; writing—original draft preparation, Z.A.A.-S., M.H.H., S.M.S.-M., R.M.S.A., N.D., L.A. and A.H.G.; writing—review and editing, Z.A.A.- S., M.H.H., S.M.S.-M., R.M.S.A., N.D., L.A. and A.H.G.; visualization, L.A.; supervision, L.A. and A.H.G.; project administration, Z.A.A.-S., M.H.H., S.M.S.-M., R.M.S.A., N.D., L.A. and A.H.G. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
