As more clients have databases hosted elsewhere or in the cloud it would be great if Jet Professional would support the ability to request an encrypted connection. 

This is discussed in the link belowin the Connection encryption and certificate validation section.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/sql-database-security-guidelines/

The JRDS could be a good option for this but the client may not have the ability to install additional software in the SQL environment, fx: with an Azure SQL database.

I would envision this as a "Use SSL Encryption" checkbox when configuring a Jet Data Warehouse data source for example.