Putty comes with some additional utilities. One of them plink, can be used to connect to remote machine, and then have it route a local port to the remote machine as if it was local, essentially creates an ssl tunnel
plink.exe
plink -ssh $username@$server -L <localport>:localhost:<remoteport> -C -N
This would create an ssl tunnel, and any traffic to the <localport> of the localhost would be pushed to the <remoteport>
eg. For mysql:
C:Program FilesPuTTY>plink -ssh <user>@<server> -L 3366:localhost:3306 -C -N
This would now allow the mysql admin to connect to localhost:3366, which would tunnel to the remote server and talk to 3306!
Great for say connecting a local mysql admin console to a remote server.