The possibility of having the Internet accessibility everywhere and every time and the progressive reduction of the dimensions of hardware equipment, in addition to the advent of novel ICT paradigms realizing the Internet of Things and Smart City visions, made available the design and realization of an innovative type of applications where data play a key role, promising to achieve a non-negligible impact on the society and business processes. The right management, control, and distribution of data are extremely critical process in our society, so that it is always referred as information society. This is boosted by the proliferation of the social networks within our lives, and the upcoming of the Internet of Things within our homes and factories. Having such a vast volume of data to be processed in order to take decisions and/or infer knowledge poses a number of challenges. The issue of properly storing such data leads to the advent of different approaches than the traditional relational databases, such as the NoSQL products. The issue of supporting the scalability of the overall communication infrastructure and to balance the load of the consequent processing cause the shift from proprietary and centralized computing solutions to more distributed and multi-tenant approaches, such as the cloud computing and its variants. However, the processing is still centralized in the core of the infrastructures, and we only see a change on how such a Finally, we would like to express our sincere appreciation for the valuable contributions made by all the authors. Our special thanks go to Professor Geoffrey C. fox, the Editor in Chief of the Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience Journal, for allowing us to publish this Special Issue and for his great support throughout the entire publication process. 16