With the intensive and large scale development of cloud computing, security becomes one of the most important problems. As an important part of security domain, access control technique is used to limit users' capability and scope to access data and ensure the information resources not to be used and accessed illegally. This paper focuses on the state-of-the-art research of access control technology in cloud computing environment. First, it briefly introduces access control theory, and discusses the access control framework in cloud computing environment. Then, it thoroughly surveys the access control problems in cloud computing environment from three aspects including cloud access control model, cloud access control based on ABE (attribute-based encryption) cryptosystem, and multi-tenant and virtualization access control in cloud. In addition, it probes the best current practices of access control technologies within the major cloud service providers and open source cloud platforms. Finally, it summarizes the problems in the current research and prospects the development of future research.