Campus colleagues,

Beginning October 1, 2025, SJSU faculty and staff will have access to a new tool called “Virtru” for encrypting your communications and files in Gmail and Google Drive.

With Virtru for Gmail, you’re able to encrypt and send sensitive documents to colleagues, students, and external partners. Virtru offers seamless encryption for email and attachments. Curious about Virtru in action? Check out this short video for a quick overview.

Google’s client-side encryption (CSE) for Google Workspace with Virtru is another important innovation that adds a layer of additional security and privacy to cloud-hosted data in Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meet. CSE is a privacy-enhanced collaboration technology that enables customers to use their encryption keys to encrypt their data, ensuring no unauthorized party – including Google – has access to this information.

If you’re signed in to Chrome with your @sjsu.edu email account, the “Virtru Email Protection” extension will be installed for you automatically. Using Edge? Please visit the Chrome Web Store to install the Virtru Email Protection extension. The Chrome Web Store extensions are compatible with Edge. You will need to install the extension on every machine you use for SJSU Google Workspace. The Virtru Email Protection extension will add nearly seamless encryption support to your Gmail.

You can find step-by-step guides on how to enable Virtru on our support information page. If you have any questions about Email encryption or Google Client Side Encryption with Virtru, submit a help ticket.

Thank you,
Atul Pala
Interim AVP, IT Infrastructure & Operations
& Interim Sr. Director, Customer Service
SJSU IT