Is your user journey On-point? On-Cloud vs On-Premise.

These days user-first is the maxim of every successful company. The product roadmap, features, messaging, UI/UX, marketing, everything revolves around what the user wants. It is no surprise that companies pay close attention to every point in the user journey.

Product infrastructure plays a pivotal role in this user journey. It can either be On-Premise or On-Cloud. On-Premise products are installed on the local machine of the user, whereas On-Cloud products are hosted by a 3rd party vendor on their servers. Let’s dive deeper into the user journey on both infrastructures.

On-premise vs. On-cloud

On-Premise Infrastructure
The journey begins with the users buying the product license and installing the product or asking the IT personnel to use a company license and install the product on their system.
Post installation, the user experience heavily depends on the hardware configuration of the system, and would be unaffected by the network connection in use. The product becomes an app on the system and can be launched from there. This effectively means that users have to carry their system to use the product at different locations.
Users can save their work on their own system, and that data can be accessed only on that device. This is very strong on security but very weak on accessibility and collaboration.

On-Cloud Infrastructure
The journey would begin with users selecting a subscription model for the product and paying online. This journey reduces the intervention of IT personnel, as no licensing or installation is required in this infrastructure. Users would simply log on to any browser and open a specific URL to access the product. This gives an unparalleled level of accessibility to the user, who can now access their work from any system anywhere in the world, and can collaborate seamlessly with their colleagues.
But on the flip side, data is now stored on 3rd party servers who would be responsible for its security. Additionally, user experience will still rely slightly on hardware performance, but now it will largely depend on a good internet connection. In fact, in absence of network access, users cannot access their work at all.

Try it yourself
Now that you know the user journeys, a great example of On-Premise vs. On-Cloud is Microsoft Word/ Pages vs. Google Docs respectively.
Try writing “www.vipulja.in" on both products and comment below to share which user journey did you prefer.