Storing Sensor Data for Analysis of the Office
I have been doing similar project in my college. I have classroom and I'm supposed to collect data like temp, humidity, light, occupancy, etc. Assuming that you have worked with sensors and motes to use, I'm going to explain rest of the structure.

You need sensor network setup and like you said you have done it. These sensor networks generally do not send data directly over internet so you need a Gateway that can collect data from sensors and send it over internet to local server.

On server side you need REST API and you could use any language to develop it and I use PHP. I find it very easy to use and develop using PHP. This REST API shall receive data from Gateway and store it into database. I use mysql database because amount of data is not so big for us. But if your data is big enough you can use big data Nosql tool like mongoDB or so. Whatever type of database you use structure remains same. 

For sending data from Gateway to server you can use protocols like HTTP or MQTT whichever you feel comfortable. What I do is I have WSN controller that sends data over USB to Gateway then Gateway sends data to server over Ethernet. So I had to develop USB to Ethernet Gateway. If you can just take two UART terminals out of your controller you can build UART to Ethernet Gateway using any microcontroller or even Arduino Ethernet shield would work in that case.

In my case data is sensed periodically but as you said you are sensing data when event of interest occurs then you can use poisson distribution method over periodically collected data to predict what is average number of events per day and then you can decide if your data is big or not.