Our intranet site has 5,000 users. It is running on SharePoint 2013 on-premise, and has a top navigation menu item named "Applications." When user hovers over "Applications", a list of applications will be displayed on a drop down overlay in the form of tiles. The user can then drag-and-drop the tiles to rearrange the order of the application tiles if desired. When the user does that, the new tiles order needs to be saved as a serialized string via JSON for future use. We have a security policy not to use cookies.
What would be the most efficient way for storing custom user settings like this in SharePoint 2013? Save to a list? Save to an external database table via BCS? Custom property in User Profile?
Thanks for your help.