**5. Conclusion**

The need to initially assess, and then conduct ongoing monitoring of an organization's overall risk posture, the risk posture of its assets, processes, and systems has been clearly established. The more valuable the information, asset, activity, or operation, the greater the need to increase the frequency of monitoring activities to ensure these resources are not compromised, or to identify and respond to any compromises as quickly as possible. This chapter shows how the IA OM® metric herein described provides an enterprise-wide risk management metric that can integrate synergistically with other risk management tools and efforts within an organization to provide monitoring personnel and decision-makers with the timely, accurate, and useful information they need to perform their functions and ensure their organization's mission and business functions are protected. IA OM® not only provides a metric targeted to organizational senior management, but one that can be used by decision-makers at all levels in the organization to ensure the processes and assets they are responsible for are protected in a way that aligns with the risk management strategy of the organization.
