IoT
Look, if you are going to do IoT you need: A network technician, a sysadmin, multiple sites, the mind set of a proper engineer and a lot of time to experiment and test. You'll need a safety first mentality and a few other skills.
I have most of the above, including a lot of tape. I am starting with ESP8266s and simple circuits, Mosquitto and Home Assistant. My VMs live on a proper SAN and VMware cluster. I start with multiple segregated VLANs and firewalls (including hosts). All comms including MQTT are TLS 1.2 or similar. Web apps live behind HA Proxy etc etc. If anything fails, it is designed to fail to manual operation rather than fucked.
Oh and the wife is the customer.