All that has been said and written about the challenges associated with the Internet of Things (IoT) does not quite prepare you for the practical difficulties that crop up as you start implementing and deploying IoT solutions. Most of the publicly available knowledge about IoT challenges relates to high-level issues that are typically addressed through architecture and design decisions. One of our recent successful implementations, an enterprise-wide Remote Energy Management System (REMS), brought us face-to-face with an entirely new set of ground-level challenges, from data ingestion to data storage, to data processing, to data analytics and visualization.