Attended Burton (now acquired by Gartner) Catalyst 2010 in San Diego, an excellent forum to get upto speed on what is happening in technology world in terms of standards and trends.

Paradigm shifts:
* Pushing core to the outside
* How SAAS, HIAS, PAAS, have provided capabilities to the industry in terms of scalability. Users pay only what they need. * Stop wasting platform resources by leveraging virtualization
* Chaning views on how Identities should be managed
* Writing applications that are cloud aware and are able to co-exist on a platform

Firewalls In General

A lot of virtualization has happened in organizations without any regard for security.  Security professional can continue to warn businesses about some of the impending security issues with virtualization, don't expect them to secure their environments unless and until a system(s) is compromised.
Although all the attacks are possibilities, none of them have actaully happened.  Some of the possibilities are:

As per the following article: http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Enterprise-Infrastructure/f103508d-d9a0-4f01-bbf3-394577c59ca5.html