Staging error connecting to server

I have seen some posts similar to this, but not sure my question is answered. I have 3 servers - dev, test, prod. Test is new. I previously had dev and prod. I successfully staged from dev to prod in the past without issue. We recently forced https on the sites (which are hosted in Azure). Today, we also had the certificates expired and had to upload and bind new certificates. Now when I try to check server availability in the servers portion of staging from the source server (dev), I get "The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send.". I get it on the prod server (which used to work) and also on the new test server that we are adding into the mix. Based on other posts and our circumstances, it would appear that this is related to introducing SSL or the new certificate. I restarted the sites in question, but I am still getting the error. If anyone can point me to documentation on how to resolve staging over forced HTTPS, that would be appreciated as that seems to be the issue here.

Thanks.