The handshake failure could be a buggy TLSv1 protocol implementation.
In our case this helped with java 7:
java -Dhttps.protocols=TLSv1.2,TLSv1.1,TLSv1
The jvm will negotiate in this order. The servers with the latest update will do 1.2, the buggy ones will go down to v1 and that works with the similar v1 in java 7.