There has been a lot of discussion about the term “attack surface” over the last few years as microsegmentation becomes a more commonly understood technology and capability. The main difference is that — as opposed to “shrinking” the attack surface — this path focuses on replacing the threat level altogether. This model creates an intelligent wrapper in which you encapsulate the workload you are protecting. The intelligent attack surface will ensure only the current version of the strong cipher suites is supported on external connections, even if the workload only supports SSLv2/v3 or.”]
Source: https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/microsegmentation-the-need-for-an-intelligent-attack-surface