With five offices in Australia and New Zealand, financial services company William Buck will implement a document management system and optical character recognition (OCR) server to enable electronic archiving and searching of its content.

George Khalil, Buck's IT manager, said compliance measures like Sarbanes-Oxley are "really hitting hard" in the local market.

"Compliance is a grey area, especially in regard to e-mail," Khalil said. "Companies want to be compliant but at same time they can only be compliant if everything is stored."

Khalil said preparing for compliance legislation may cost Australian companies "a lot of dollars up front" but that it may save a lot money in future if there is a lawsuit brought against them.

In William Buck's case to ensure compliance, it needs to archive all correspondence with its clients as it "gives a lot of advice" via e-mail which therefore needs to be stored securely.