it depends too much on what you are using for your intermediate layer, but in general - yes, there is something ssl based that can serve. usually you will find that the intermediate layer is something like a tomcat servlet, addressable via https.
question on when you should or shouldn't bother depends on your attack model - if you have a "red" dmz (web facing) and then "green" dmz (filtered between both red and lan) under what circumstances do you expect the traffic from red to green to be "sniffable" without any prior compromise of either the "red" or "green" service hosts?
