In a hybrid cloud environment, enterprise business applications and data are often transferred across different cloud services. For complex and diversified cloud service environments, most hybrid cloud applications adopt access control policies made around only access subjects and adjust the policies manually, which cannot meet the fine-grained dynamic access control requirements at different stages of the data life cycle. This study proposes AHCAC, an adaptive access control method oriented to data life cycle in a hybrid cloud environment. Firstly, the the policy description idea based on key attributes are employed to unify the heterogeneous policies of the full life cycle of data under the hybrid cloud. Especially, the “stage” attribute is introduced to explicitly identify the life-cycle state of data, which is the basis for achieving fine-grained access control oriented to data life cycle. Secondly, in view of the similarity and consistency of access control policy with the same life-cycle stage, the policy distance is defined, and a hierarchical clustering algorithm based on the policy distance is proposed to construct the corresponding data access control policy in each life-cycle stage. Finally, when the life-cycle stage of data is changed, the adaptation and loading of policies of corresponding data stages in the policy evaluation are triggered through key attribute matching, which realizes the adaptive access control oriented to the data life cycle. This study also conducts experiments to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method on OpenStack and open-source policy evaluation engine Balana.