I'm still quite astonished that (according to some of the comments) it's fairly standard that traffic between datacenters is not encrypted. Granted we're talking about extremely large throughput, but I thought Google of all companies would have invested in routers capable of doing this or at least gone to the trouble of designing their own hardware that does it; since Google is no stranger to this already.
Why would routers do this? IPSec didn't exactly take off (this weeks news reminded us why), so end-to-end encryption wouldn't really happen on their level. That said, I certainly expected and assumed Google would already encrypt traffic between data centers. Whats the point of forcing HTTPS on gmail when you constantly backup my complete email repository across the world over unencrypted connections? In this new cont…
Oh, jezus. Did you read it on the Internets?
IPsec (s is in lowercase) is the standard to securing L2 connectivity and it has been ubiquitously used for site-to-site and client-to-site connectivity for ages. In addition to several mature FOSS implementations, every network equipment vendor ships one. There is also a ton of client software - Windows supported it since Windows 2000, the SSH company (you know, the ssh creators) has been selling an IPsec Toolkit since as early as 1999, Cisco has a VPN client that is de-facto software in Cisco-based shops for remote workers, etc.