You can spend $10 million on any project by putting a team of 30 engineers at 150K each on it and letting them buy and deploy 1000 IPsec gateways or SSL accelerators or what have you at a cost of $5500 each including a 15% maintenance contract and internal hosting costs.

I would guess that the bulk of the costs is installing the processing power that enables the encryption.

Ah, I just reread that article and now I see:

"The current and former employees say he inspired a small team of young engineers to develop more secure code, improve the company’s defenses — including encrypting traffic between Yahoo’s data centers"

So that makes more sense now, I guess it's possible to spend that much on "encryption". People and processing power are expensive I suppose.

They really are!

And the cost of the people to implement and run the IDS etc $10 mill doesn't go that far in terms of hardware and FTE's.

Maybe they bought 250 HSMs.