I only have one word to say about this... why?
There's quite a few reasons, predominantly that every time you access a page on the database, the address and password of the database has to be sent to the server and if that's unencrytpted it can be hijacked and hackers can get in and destroy ll the work we've done. It wasn't an issue before, but as we're getting bigger and bigger and people are starting to take notice, security becomes a much more important issue. Also, almost all of the Search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) give more weight to sites that are secure so that will help us in our rankings.