javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: Remote host closed connection during handshake during web service communicaiton

Java 7 defaults to TLS 1.0, which can cause this error when that protocol is not accepted. I ran into this problem with a Tomcat application and a server that would not accept TLS 1.0 connections any longer. I added

-Dhttps.protocols=TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2

to the Java options and that fixed it. (Tomcat was running Java 7.)