Multiservice, scalable, and secure headend:

The Cisco ASR 1000 Series offers full-service IP Security (IPsec) VPN aggregation that scales to meet the new bandwidth demands of service provider IP VPNs.

Embedded high-speed firewall:

With the Zone-Based Policy Firewall, the Cisco ASR 1000 Series acts as an implicit complete barrier between any interfaces not members of the same zone. An explicit zone-pair policy must be specified (using Cisco Policy Language; that is, MQC) in each direction between each zone pair. The policy establishes within the router the kind of stateful inspection (Layer 4, Layer 7, or application) and session parameters to apply to each zone pairing.