El Abbadi's research addresses some of the most fundamental problems facing us at the beginning of the twenty first century, namely, how to manage the ever increasing amount of data humanity is generating and studying. The issue of scalability of data is encountered in a wide variety of applications, including astronomy, biology, physics, as well as network analysis and data mining. At the same time, as people and enterprises depend increasingly on storing private data in databases and computers, issues of privacy and security become of paramount importance. .

The main challenge is to efficiently manage this large amount of growing data so as to respond in a timely and secure manner to the queries posed by scientists, biologists, engineers, analysts, etc. The focus of El Abbadi's research is to explore novel methods to solve these scalability problems in a reliable, efficient and privacy preserving manner. His approach uses novel techniques, and can be categorized as methods using novel hardware solutions, methods using efficient mathematical tools, and methods using good old software solutions for storage management. Prof. El Abbadi's research is grounded in specific applications that ensure that his results are practical and can have the strongest impact of the real world.